Growing and Cooking Brussels Sprouts

I tried growing Brussels Sprouts this year for the first time and put them in a nice sunny spot with the rest of my brassicas. They started off growing well and then gradually started to look like scruffy cabbages that wouldn’t heart up. After a while I could see some tiny buds forming up the stem. They are supposed fatten up and then you can start to pick the biggest ones from the bottom and get several harvests. Mine seemed to do everything wrong: the buds at the bottom didn’t grow at all and the ones at the top opened up rather than staying as a nice round ball. In desperation I decided to harvest the bigger ‘sprouts’ and use them in a stir-fry – which wasn’t bad but not what I had anticipated doing with my Brussels sprouts.