Waltham

 

Broccoli has a long culinary history going back to the Romans. The florets, leaves, and stems are packed with vitamin C and provide calcium, potassium, and iron. The 4"-6", blue-green heads are delicious raw or cooked. 'Waltham 29' grows prolific side shoots and is specially adapted for cold tolerance. Freezes well. Kids will delight in the "little trees" on their plate. Waltham is a great cool-climate Broccoli variety that produces nice medium-sized heads and a fine crop of side shoots! Plants are non-uniform in maturity, resulting in a prolonged harvest period, which is ideal for the home vegetable garden. This Waltham Broccoli is easy to grow and delicious, taking 85 days to reach maturity.

Waltham 29 broccoli seed is named for Waltham, MA, where researchers at the University of Massachusetts developed it in 1950. However, the plant from which modern broccoli plant seed is derived first grew in the wild in the Mediterranean region and in Asia Minor. Broccoli gradually spread to the rest of Europe and to the New World, where Thomas Jefferson included this strange new vegetable in his experimental garden. The Italians appreciated it so much that it got the name "Italian asparagus." After World War I, Italian brothers Stefano and Andrea D'Arrigo brought their Sicilian variety of broccoli and began growing it in San Jose, Calfornia; they later shipped it to Boston's North End, where it established a quickly expanding market.