When do you pick fennel

It can be a little tricky to grow, but with the right care and attention, a home grown crop is well worth the effort. Freshly picked fennel makes a great addition to summer salads but is also delicious cooked as an accompaniment to meat dishes, or on its own. If you want to get an early start with Florence fennel, sow seeds into modules under cover.

Water in well and keep moist. Later in the season, you can sow directly into well-prepared, warm soil. Place seeds in rows, approximately 1. Florence fennel thrives in warm, sunny and moist conditions. The key to success is to prepare a bed of well-drained, fertile soil in an open site.

Any shock to the system will affect the growth of the tender, edible bulb and cause the plant to bolt, flower and set seed quite rapidly.

Your Florence fennel bulbs will be ready to harvest in about 14 weeks. Take part in our research. Meet the team. Shop plants rhsplants. Shopping with the RHS. RHS Christmas gifts. Help us achieve our goals Make a donation.

Join the RHS today and support our charity Join now. Save to My scrapbook. Jobs to do now. Sow Florence fennel grows best during warm summers and needs an open, sunny site with fertile, moist but well-drained soil. Sowing indoors In cooler climates or for early crops, you can sow seeds singly in modules in a greenhouse or on a warm windowsill.

Grow Provide plenty of moisture consistently throughout the growing season, keep the area weed free, and add a mulch of garden compost to the soil to hold in moisture. Feed with a high potassium fertiliser every two weeks once established. Subsequently, question is, how do you identify fennel?

If you are unsure if what you have is fennel , give it a smell - the smell will undeniably tell you if you have fennel. You can find fennel primarily in the spring through early fall, though I have seen it at all times of the year, and the flowers and pollen can be found in the summer.

All parts of the fennel plant —bulb, stalk, and the feathery fronds—are edible , and will add texture and flavor to salads, slaws, pastas, and more.

Thinly sliced raw fennel bulb adds a sweet licorice flavor and crunchy texture to salads. Fennel seeds are ready to be harvested in the fall when they've matured and turned brown.

However, fennel sometimes doesn't flower and produce seeds until the second year after sowing. Florence fennel bulbs should be harvested when they're the size of a small fist or a tennis ball. Can you eat fennel after it flowers? The entire plant of fennel, including the flowers, is edible and can be used.

Seeds, stems, stalks, leaves, bulb, roots, flowers all have valuable food quality. Why doesn't my fennel have a bulb? So, the most likely reason for no bulb on fennel is that you have planted the wrong type. You can still use the lower stalks, the leaves and seeds, which will have a somewhat mellower but still delightful flavor than the bulb.

Another reason for fennel with no bulb is planting too late. How do you harvest and store fennel? Florence fennel Foeniculum vulgare var. The flattened bulb of leaf-stalk base is ready for harvest 90 to days after sowing—when the bulb is about 3 inches 7.

You can cut the bulbous stalk just below the point where the individual stalks come together. You can use the leaves anytime after they have grown to about 18 inches long, but before they flower. As for sowing new seed: fennel requires a frost-free growing season and needs about days to reach bulb harvest. If you live in a cold-winter climate you can start seed indoors 2 to 4 weeks before the last frost and transplant them out when the plant has about four leaves.

If you live in a warm-winter climate: you can sow in spring for a summer crop or sow in late summer for a fall crop. A very warm regions, fennel will bolt in hot weather. I would like to correct one thing, the caterpillars you referred to as Parsley caterpillars are actually the caterpillars of the Black Swallowtail butterfly.

The main reason I grow fennel is for the butterflies, as this, Italian parsley, dill, etc.