Goliath and the small head of cauliflower

AWWWWWW!!!! Isn't this adorable! A cute, little, smaller-than-palm sized cauliflower head from a cute little cauliflower plant. Right?

Wrong!

The plant this came from was huge!!!!! Ginormous! Like, taking over the garden kind of big. 

For months I would go on a safari through my cauliflower plants and see if anything was growing. And for all of those months, no cauliflower could be found. Then, right before it was supposed to get cold, I went out to chop down the plant and clear it out from the garden. But lo and behold! Two of the plants had a little cauliflower growing. 

So I left it. I had heard that cauliflower can survive some frost (True? Who knows.) so I left it, hoping that we'd be able to cook some nice cauliflower.

But, right before the big snow dump I went out one last time, ready to cut off whatever had grown. I got 2 heads, Both about this size. Frozen. Underdeveloped. Cute, but sad.

What the crud! How could this have happened? No, seriously, how could this have happened? Any savvy gardeners know how I can have Goliath plants and only get fun size cauliflower?

I know there is some kind of a lesson that I could take from this. Some kind of parallel life story that I compare this too, but right now I am too frustrated to come up with one.

Here I put all of this hard work, time, energy, and money into this plant and all I get out of it is a small, soggy piece of cauliflower. Oh sure, on the outside the plant looks all perfect and huge and awesome. But beneath the surface it was barely producing. And no matter how long I watered it, nurtured it, all that came out was a little flowerette. 

I know that nothing else in life is like that...

Though I will say that, after thinking my plants weren't going to give me anything, finding a little bud of hope inside was quite fun! And even though I only ended up with a little cauliflower, I really do think it is cute and precious. It was a miracle!

Again, I can't think of anything else in life where that happens...

I've learned a lot from gardening, and hopefully next year it will be all the better!