A Cauliflower Harvest and How to Get Your Kids to Love It

Do you have a favorite winter vegetable?


I have a few, but cauliflower is near the top of the list.

Cauliflower Harvest

While I have had my struggles growing broccoli – its cousin, cauliflower grows very well in my garden.

Every January, you’ll find me in the garden looking at my cauliflower plants to see when they are ready to harvest.

I’m not sure why I like cauliflower so much – I certainly didn’t as a child and I still don’t like it cooked.

As a mom of 5, I recently came up with a neat trick to get kids to not only eat, but like cauliflower.

It all came about when I got tired of spending a lot of money of bags of lettuce during the summer months after my lettuce crop had faded. So, I decided to chop up carrots, celery, cucumbers and cauliflower into small chunks.

 I like to call it the “Four C’s Salad”.

I mix all the cut vegetables together and lightly dress it with my grandmother’s “Top Secret Salad Dressing”.

The kids love it and so does my husband, who doesn’t like salad.

You can also sprinkle small cauliflower bits over your traditional salads much like you would cheese. Kids don’t really notice that they are eating cauliflower.  My kids like it now since it reminds them of small chunks of cheese in appearance.

I will be planting some new cauliflower transplants in my garden this month (cauliflower is hard to start from seed) so that I will have more cauliflower ready in early spring.

Do you like cauliflower?  How do you like to prepare it?

*This is the third post this week about my winter vegetable harvest – so far, we’ve covered broccoli, 

‘White Icicle’ radishes/Swiss Chard and now cauliflower. On Monday, I’ll show you some fresh vegetables from my mother’s winter vegetable garden.

Noelle Johnson, aka, 'AZ Plant Lady' is a author, horticulturist, and landscape consultant who helps people learn how to create, grow, and maintain beautiful desert gardens that thrive in a hot, dry climate. She does this through her consulting services, her online class Desert Gardening 101, and her monthly membership club, Through the Garden Gate. As she likes to tell desert-dwellers, "Gardening in the desert isn't hard, but it is different."