Concur. Snow ball can be finicky to grow. In Massachusetts, you should be able to grow most varieties as your summer temps will rarely exceed cauliflower limits. Here June temps often exceed 100 degrees which cauliflower can't handle so I must grow quick maturing varieties. Cauliflower needs good soil, preferably on the neutral side. Best practice is to start them 8-10 weeks before your last frost date and transplant about two weeks before your frost date. Use Bt or row covers to keep the cabbage worms off them. If you have cabbage root maggots, that is a whole nother problem. Candid Charm has perform well here Montana, even better Rushmore has also been excellent also White Cloud and White Passion Snow Crown was mediocre under my conditions

Sorry, no it is not normal. Your seedlings are starved for light and as the many discussions here and on the Growing from Seed forum show, it just isn't possible to grow healthy seedlings using only window light. It just isn't intense enough nor full spectrum enough nor long enough exposure this time of year. That is why most all of us use various types of fluorescent light set-ups. This time of year we even have to use supplemental lighting in the commercial greenhouses. In this case enclosing them in a sort of plastic greenhouse only reduces the light exposure more. I'd suggest a review of the FAQs on the Growing from Seed forum and have linked one on lighting below. You can try to save some of these (the ones without broken stems) by transplanting them into deep containers (remove the netting first), burying all the stem, and then arrange for much more lights for them or they will just get leggy again. Search 'light set-up' here for many discussions and photos on various seed starting set up. Hope this helps. Dave Here is a link that might be useful: Growing from Seed FAQs

Lots of rain here, too. But I'm still grateful for it, we have been at drought or near-drought conditions for 6 of the past seven years. If it keeps coming down, I won't have much of a garden, but the watertable might finally get replenished. DH's lettuce has been doing just fine in the coldbed, although an invasion of slugs made a lot of leaves disappear. I reminded him to put the coffee grounds around the plants, so the new leaves are now growing perfect. He has a mental glitch about the coffee, applying after a slug attack and then not again until another invasion and another reminder. The peas are starting to bloom. The potatoes are growing faster than I can keep the stems covered. No cabbage, kale, or cauliflower. These normally are grown by DH and this year he didn't start any seeds, and it's been too wet to seed directly. I guess I'll see if any of the local nurseries have cabbage plants. It feels strange to be in the middle of May and most of the garden still looks like winter. It's just been too wet to get it ready for the seedlings.

I've been feeding them with compost tea when I water twice each day. Like most tap water, mine has a a fairly high pH, so minerals may not be as available to the plants as they should be. I try to avoid all toxic stuff, but I do use non-organic fertilizers when my compost for tea is either used up or washed out. I mainly compost maple tree leaves and grass clippings that I bag with the mower each fall. I gave the plants dose of Epson salts and bought a small package of Miracid fertilizer with trace elements. I'm going to try adding a small bit of this each day with their water to lower the pH and supplement their feed now that I am running out of compost that is not already washed out. The rate of leaves dying has slowed down a bit, so it looks like the plant might survive to give me a fall crop after the weather cools down a bit. I am not sure if the improvement is because our temp for the past week has finally dropped from over 100 to the high 80s. It may also be that the sick leaves are the left over ones from before I got rid of the last few aphids and mites. I cannot find a single aphid or mite anymore. It cannot tell for sure which growth on the plant as emerged since the final bugs were beaten. I did take some of the leaves and hold them up to a flash light last night to see if there were any pin-holes. The leaves that have any yellow all seem to have some tiny holes that light would shine through, but the newer mature leaves do not have any holes or yellow. Thank you for the suggestion regarding the magnesium. Between the Epson Salts, more balanced pH, lower temp, and beneficial bugs, I hope somethings works. If I can get this problem with leave drop fixed, I think I can get a good fall crop. The plant's basic stems and roots seem to still be very healthy and there is enough new growth with leaves to still produce a good crop once our night temps drop back below 70 so my blooms will set fruit. Knoxville is near the mountains, but down in river valley, so our cool fall temps are moderated. Last year, I was able to cover my plants with a sheet at night for the first 3 or 4 frosts, and then we got a warm spell without more frost until mid November. After I gave up and picked the green fruit before our first really cold night, I had ripe tomatoes until nearly Christmas. Between tress and my 4 dogs which love to dig, I had a hard time finding a good place to grow a couple of tomato plants, so I've grown 2 or 3 in pots for the past few years. I read about the Topsy-Turvey tomato planters that a local man had invented, so I decided to try the idea 2 years ago. For anyone that wants to grow tomatoes next year in a container, I recommend the idea highly. I don't have to stake them and the plants are clean and dry up off the ground. I'm disabled and living on social security, so I try to make do with things I can scavenge whenever possible. For my planters, I use a 5 or 10 gallon bucket. I tied a strong nylon rope around the top of the buckets, because I did not trust the handles to be strong enough to support both the bucket's contents and the plant's growth. I drilled a 2 inch hole in the center of the bottom of the buckets. When I transplant my seedlings, I sit the bucket right-side-up on the edge of a table with part hanging over the edge so I can get to the hole in the bottom. I slide the plant's roots up from the bottom through the hole in the bucket and then wedged soft sponge-like foam around the plant's stem to keep it from falling out and keep the dirt from running out when I add it next. After the tomato plant is in the hole with its foam collar, I reach in the top of the bucket and pull the plant's roots and stem up into the bucket until only the top stems and leaves of the plant are hanging out of the bottom of the bucket. I then add enough dirt to hold the plant in position. Pause before adding so much dirt that the bucket gets too heavy to lift up to hang. Warning, this thing will get heavy, so a simple cup hook screwed into the overhang will not be enough to hold it once you get it full of dirt, watered, with several feet of foliage. While it is somewhat clumsy to put together, if you have a place to hang it that gets lots of sun, it works great. I was lucky in that someone in the past had already put up a mounting for a swing on the porch. The porch is so sunny, it lends itself better for container gardening than it does for a porch swing, so I use the heavy hooks intended for a porch swing with two adults, to instead support large hanging tomato plants. After I have the pots hanging, I then finish filling the buckets with a mixture of compost and potting mix. I use fresh potting mix each year and wash the buckets with bleach each spring to avoid soil borne diseases and pests from the prior year. In full sun and heat, I water the plants each morning and afternoon. As the stems grow, they will tend to curve back upward in graceful "swooping" arcs that almost hide the bucket they are growing in. Once the plants are heavy with full-sized fruit they will hang more straight, so try to put the pot as high as you can, and still be able to reach up to water it from the top. Cherry tomatoes plants make a very beautiful hanging plant when grown this way. The graceful arcs of lush green leaves are accented so well by the clusters of ripe fruit, you would be tempted to leave then on the plant for decoration, if they weren't so tasty. They are so good, that many of them never even make it inside the house, because I cannot resist picking a few to eat fresh from the vine, every time I go outside and walk past them. While they don't produce bragging sized fruit, I always plant a cherry tomato plant because they are so predictably productive. For me, they always seem to be the most disease and pest resistant and best at continuing to set fruit during the hot summer. Greg