This year I made a real effort to have broccoli, my favorite vegetable, available in larger quantities than I could eat at once. Every year I hope to have some to freeze, and every year I gobble it all up as soon as it is ready. But this year I did succeed, by putting in 12 plants in late May that would mature after my earliest planting, and mature more or less all at the same time so that I couldn’t just hog it all at once in one giant broccoli orgy.
Broccoli is a very heavy feeder, and when it is a bit established I pile a heavy mulch of alfalfa and a little chicken manure all around the base, a few inches back from the stem. This conserves moisture and provides nutrients in a steady fashion throughout the growing season, allowing my broccoli heads to get as big as 12” across.
The result is that my refrigerator is crammed with broccoli right now, with more sitting around or out in the garden waiting to be brought in. This is my idea of a really wonderful problem to have.
As far as what to do with broccoli, there is no question that roasting is my favorite technique. Here is an excellent basic recipe, which is very similar to the way I do it, and there are endless variations that you can dream up on your own. This is, in my opinion, too good to be a side dish and deserves to be the very center of the table, but certainly it goes well alongside a steak, roasted chicken, or just about anything else you could name. If you aren’t sure what else to do with broccoli, the wonderful food 52 site has great recipes and is worth a browse.
https://food52.com/recipes/21828-parmesan-crusted-broccoli
As far as health questions go, I think that green vegetables are vitally important to a long and healthy life. There is now a small dietary movement favoring pure carnivory, and the wacko fringe elements of that group believe that eating green vegetables will probably kill you. It is my view that this completely ignores the demographic data that all the healthiest and longest lived populations in the world eat plenty of green vegetables. So make your own decisions, but don’t ignore the data. Here’s one study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29739681
And one specifically on ovarian cancer:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29693426
I won’t make extravagant claims for cruciferous vegetables, but it is at least clear from the data that they certainly won’t kill you.
My urban homestead 