Gardeners have their own vocabulary, which can be strange and entertaining. What exactly is a bulbil, or vivipary? This article is the first of a series on horticultural lingo. If you love plants and words, you might wonder what some gardening terms mean and how we came to use them. We hope you’ll enjoy these short articles.
Bolting
A student once told me that this term made her think of a cartoon plant running for an exit! What exactly is bolting? Bolting refers to a plant that flowers and forms seeds (suddenly) when we don’t want or expect it to flower. This can include cool-season plants that flower after exposure to hot weather, or biennials that are flowering too early in their life cycle. The process can be initiated differently for plants even within the same plant family and can be quite complex. Examples of bolting plants that you may have seen in your own garden include cabbage, parsley, broccoli, onion, radish, lettuce, and cilantro.
This parsley plant was exposed to very cool spring temperatures and then multiple 100-degree days in a row. Parsley is a biennial plant that can bolt if exposed to these temperatures. The leaves and stems of the plant are ruined by this process— they lose their fresh flavor and tender texture and become tough and bitter.
Other plants that bolt can be ruined for table use, too. Bolted cabbage no longer has a tight head of leaves. Radishes become bitter, and onions can rot.
Bolting, therefore, is not a desirable process for most vegetable and herb gardeners. But why do plants bolt? Causes vary depending on the type of crop, but may include changes of temperature, daylength, and stresses like too much rain or dry soil. Vernalization is a related topic and will be discussed in a future article.
It’s important to note that there are varieties of crop plants that have been developed to be slow to bolt. If you have repeated trouble with bolting, you may want to try one of these.
When a garden plant bolts, often the best course of action is to put it in the compost bin and start new plants when the weather is favorable. However, this bolted parsley plant had another use in my garden. It was full of swallowtail butterfly caterpillars, so I’ve chosen to leave it in place while starting new plants indoors.
Remember that with gardening, time spent outdoors is never wasted. Even though we may consider a crop a failure, gardening benefits our physical and mental health, and even the natural world if we are good stewards. I’ll willingly give up space in my garden to bolted parsley to see gorgeous swallowtails flitting through the yard. Enjoy your garden time!
Camille Werther is the newsletter editor for GardenSMART. She has a Master of Science degree in Horticulture from LSU and teaches botanical art and nature drawing. She is a member of GardenComm (Garden Communicators International) and the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. She was formerly Production Editor of the Journal of Natural Science Illustration and was the recipient of a GNSI Special Projects Award for this work. Visit her at camillewerther.com.
All articles are copyrighted and remain the property of the author.
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