semi-recently. i found out about petite brussesls sprouts, which have shaken my previous understanding of the brassica sphere gamut as being comprised of discrete sizes. is it possible that there are sizes of orb between the brussels sprout and the cabbage, like a baseball-sized sprout? a softball-sized cabbage, even? could the entire globe be just one gigantic brassica ball??
okay so the thing is that the relative sizes of brassica spheres (i know from previous conversations that you are referring only to leafy spheres and thus my beloved kohlrabi is not relevant to this query) are dependent on several factors. there is the average/standard size of the cultivar itself, but then there is also the influence of growing conditions! you can get larger sprouts if you fertilize them well, give them good spacing, etc. if you get into large vegetable competitions apparently the largest brussels sprout ever recorded was 18 pounds, 3 oz, which is. insane.
on the other hand, if you want smaller cabbage you can grow them with decreased spacing (Johnny's Selected Seeds says that all of the cabbage cultivars they offer are suitable for close spacing to produce mini cabbage). cabbages grown in poor soil will also be smaller.
so, if you incorporate the extremes of large sprouts and small cabbage you could cover the whole spectrum of orbs from very tiny sprouts (pick them early, or, like me the one year i tried, just do a bad job of growing them) up to cabbage that, as of the current record, weighs 138.25 pounds per head. that is considerably less than the weight of the globe, but we can only strive to expand the available sizing of brassica orbs until one day we are all consumed. amen.
