I can understand your interest, but I would think that these are treated for supermarket shelves, and if you knew 'as a gardner you would not want them, all though haveing said that I rember being given some spring cabbage plants by a comershal grower and they were the best I have ever grown.

You can get purple headed Broccoli/Calibrese seeds from anywhere that stocks those seed racks,Suttons,Thompson & Morgan etc. They don't taste much different and are grown in exactly the same way.Plants are usually sown starting April when the ground has warmed up.Set a few seeds at a time away in a tray. I would try and stagger the germination of seed & planting to every 3 weeks up till about mid June so you have a constant supply ready to crop about October/early November. Then of course the later crops can be blanched and frozen for winter use. Hope this helps.

you see that is the diferance, they are to produce one crop, we gardners like it because it is cut and come agine and of one row it can keep us all winter, it would be like planting brusel sprouts if some one came up with a little plant that only produced one sprout ,so that we had to pick the lot on one day ,you would tell them what to do with it,

Thanks for all the replies, the main reason I asked was I live in a windy spot and also have trouble with pigeons so smaller plants would be easier to cover and not get so battered by the wind.

I grow purple sprouting broccoli, from seed, in both my London and Italian gardens. The Italian crops are ready to pick from March onwards - I have about 5 plants - and in London sadly just 2 plants survived and they are a bit behind. It's a fairly slow crop in that you sow in April/May the previous year and it takes nearly a year to crop. That said, they are cut and come again.