You need to snip off the yellow flowers as they develope and hope that the heads keep growing larger.

Hum purple sprouting broccoli doesn't have heads as such you just need to keep picking the the little flowerlets and stems before they come into full flower. Calabrese, commonly thought of as broccoli, has a head similar to a cauliflower curd but not as dense even these grown in a normal garden have to be picked much smaller that what you see in your local supermarket.

Thanks for that B and MG, I knew I wouldn't get brocolli size veg but I'd hope for mouthsize florets at least. I'll keep an eye on them. First year of growing brocolli so it's a bit trial and error this year :)

For information, Donna, we have always had great difficulty with the flowering type veg and have given up trying to grow cauliflowers and similar. This doesn't mean that they don't do well up here, others manage OK, but they are not a vegetable for us.

I find the only mouth size heads are the first ones, and the others that come later round the sides are much smaller. And as you have found, you don't always even get a good sized middle one to start with. But as you can eat their stems as well its not as bad as it looks. If you look at the supermarket ones in winter you'll notice they are all tiny.

This because there are two different plants referred to as 'broccoli': The purple sprouting variety that does not produce a head as such just lots of tiny flower stems you need to pick before they actually flower (in fact 'broccoli' means 'little sprouts' in Italian!). Then you have calabrese which, as I've already said, produces a head similar to a cauliflower but not as dense or as big. The confusion comes in because so many of the supermarkets label calabrese as 'broccoli'. Calabrese is a summer vegetable but you still wont get heads much bigger than a golf ball unless you are an expert grower.

Broccoli matures in spring from sowing made the previous year, whereas calabrese types matures in mid to late summer from sowings made earlier in the same year.

B is sort of right on our giving up on 'flower' veg we do have some calabrese growing that we bought as plants, as to whether it will do anything, who knows!

Oh well we'll see how it goes! Might have to chalk this one down to (lack of) experience!!! :)

My summer ones are behaving just like the spring ones and haven't produced anything like a calbrese head, just purple little ones. And sparingly at that.

It is the weird weather I am sure!