<aside> 💡 Unlike the other chapters in this book this one isn’t totally based on experience, it reflects a series of experiments in varieties and timings for 2024 that I’m refining. My objective remains the same as with all of my other veggies, a varied, tasty diet over a long period.
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Cabbage is an ancient member of the brassica family, that generally grows close to the ground and forms a tight head, before - if you leave it too long - spitting open to reveal a large seed head, usually in spring. Collards by contrast are very cabbage like, but don’t generally form a tight head, staying loose leafed through their entire life, much like kale. There are a few kales that are also very cabbage like and help to fill any gaps between cabbage availability and are useful if you only need a few leaves, not a whole cabbage head..
Picked young all cabbages can be eaten while loose leafed, although few people do this, except for spring cabbages, which when eaten that way are often called ‘spring greens’.
<aside> 💡 I grow cabbages in a very weird way, because I like savoy and red cabbages most and because I don’t have enough space to plant cabbages in the ground in autumn for a spring harvest. If you want to grow like everyone else go to the RHS if you want to do something fun, exciting and productive read on.
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This is my basic cabbage sequence:
In early spring I’m harvesting the last of my savoy and red cabbage heads and then as spring progresses I harvest loose leaf spring cabbages and loose leaf savoy leaves as well as kale. In mid to late spring the spring cabbages heart up and then towards the end of spring the early savoys are ready and they continue until the early red cabbages arrive, these continue until August. In August the red cabbages are ready again and two successions of these last through winter, with savoys arriving in winter.
<aside> 💡 Since all these types of ‘cabbage’ are treated very similarly from now on I’m generally going to group everything under the heading of cabbage and then break down the specific types and their uses only as needed.
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I use a rating system to help me decide what to grow and it considers lots of factors, but the main ones are how tasty it is, how healthy it is to eat, how expensive it is to buy, how big it's harvest is, when it's harvest period is and whether I can buy it organically and if not how much it's sprayed.
Many of the types of cabbage listed above score very badly in this system, because they are only moderately tasty, have a fairly short harvest period which often results in a glut. They are very prone to slugs, extremely cheap to buy and are even sometimes available organically. They also take a very long time to grow and are in the ground for a very long time.
So although growing lettuce, kale or spinach you might yield £20-30/m2 from a bed, with cabbage you will be lucky to yield £10. So why bother growing cabbage? For me there are several important reasons:
<aside> 💡 All that said unless you have plenty of space I’d recommend growing kale, Brussels and kalettes rather than cabbage if your objective is to eat nutritious food, save money and eat over a long period. You can also get cabbage like leaves from calabrese and purple sprouting broccoli and finally perennial kale gives you a year round supply of cabbage like leaves too.
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To mitigate - to some extent - the long growing period cabbages are traditionally sown into a ‘seed bed’ – a site away from the main vegetable plot – then transplanted later in the season. This is because sowing them at their final spacing in your main beds would take up a lot of room early in the season, when you could be using it for fast-maturing crops such as lettuces.