Cabbage Growing Masterclass: The Secret to Year-Round Harvests

Cabbages are one of the most nutritious things you can grow, and a freshly cut cabbage has to be one of the most satisfying things you can enjoy. So let me show you what I've learned over years of growing them, including when and how to start cabbages, the best way to protect them from pests, and my secrets to growing the very best cabbages every time. What I especially love about cabbages, as well as that lovely broad range of heads, is the fact that by choosing the right varieties and sowing from late winter all the way through to late summer, we can have cabbages to harvest literally all year round. Not many crops can claim that. I like to start my cabbages off away from the main growing areas. Now, you can of course start them in the ground where they are to grow, and they're worth every square inch by the way, but by starting them off in little pots or plug trays, it means I can have something finishing off in the ground while my cabbages are starting off. I can kind of overlap my crops that way, and then the cabbages will go out as nice young little plants after about a month or so. And today I'm sowing a variety that's perfect for sowing in late summer to give us a harvest in mid-spring, at a time actually when pickings are really rather thin. This will be very welcome indeed. Now I'm just going to get on and sow. I've filled my little tray here with just an all-purpose potting mix that's been sieved or screened, and now I'm pressing it down a bit to leave little depressions to sow into. These are quite generous plugs so I can grow them on to a fair size. You could probably get away with something like this if you're going to plant them out a bit sooner, but I reckon slightly bigger plants are pretty good. It means I can overlap nicely. And in go two seeds per plug. Now any crop in the cabbage or brassica family germinates super easily, so there's a good chance I may get both seedlings come up here from the two seeds, but I'm treating this as a bit of an insurance policy just to make sure. The cabbage seeds aren't expensive so I might as well do that and just kind of save myself the heartache of an empty plug. You can also sow into a pot like this across the top and then cover with more potting mix. Then once the seedlings are up, which at this time of year will be within a week, they can be carefully jiggled out of their pot, gently teased apart, taking care not to damage the delicate roots, then potted on into their own plugs or pots. This is a great way to sow if you're especially short on space, but transplant the seedlings while they're still young so they settle into their plugs without so much as a hiccup. I've got plenty of space and seeds so I'm skipping that step by just sowing straight into my plug trays and with them sown, all that's left to do is cover them over with a bit more of our potting mix. These guys are sown, labeled and under starter's orders, but they're not going to race away until we fire the starting gun, and to do that we need to water them of course. Now use a can fitted with a rose and just keep the water moving like this, passing over several times so we're not unsettling that potting mix, and the water will go down nice and deep. Now I'm going to move this to a bright spot but not in direct sunshine so they germinate and they aren't baked, and then I'll plant them out in maybe four to five weeks. Like so many of the vegetables we grow ourselves, there's a mind-boggling range of cabbage types and varieties to choose from. There's the richly puckered savoy types, the warming cuddle-in-the-mouth joy of red cabbages, super prolific drumhead types, and the nimble and quick pointed or spring cabbages. And there are even cabbages that will store for many months. And here are some cabbages I sowed about a month ago. Now can you guess what they are? Well they are savoy cabbages, the absolute royalty of cabbages in my opinion. I love these bad boys, sweated down with a splash of water, lashings of butter, and repeated grinds of the pepper mill for an absolutely otherworldly experience. These are the best cabbage, absolutely. Now you can see here they've got a few holes in the leaves, that's because of flea beetle, a common problem in the summer. But what I've done is I've shaken them off so all the beetles ping away, and I've had them isolated and I've been keeping a beady eye on them to make sure they don't return, which they haven't. There's a little bit of damage but it's just cosmetic and these will bounce back so let's get them in. Cabbages can be planted out any size from this point upwards. Now the soil behind me here is lovely and free draining, but it's just had a crop of shallots which have come out and it's quite dry and obviously gonna have had quite a lot of nutrients taken out of it. So to combat that I'm going to go in with a fresh topping of lovely, well decomposed manure to kind of freshen things up and give these hungry plants what they need. Now the soil, as I say, is free draining which is important because in the wetter months of winter, while they like it moist, they don't want to be sat in boggy saturated ground. And then to finish, a generous handful or two of bloodfish and bone meal. This is just an organic general purpose fertilizer to help our cabbages along and there are vegan alternatives. With everything added I'm going to shuffle back and forth on my heels. Now I'm not doing a rain dance, although heaven knows we need a bit of rain. What I'm doing is I'm firming down the soil, kind of compacting it back down because cabbages love a really nice firm soil. So let's get on and plant them, and they're going about 18 inches or 45 centimeters apart both ways. I could space them a little bit further still for the very biggest champion-sized heads, but I've got a family of three and, well, I think a medium-sized cabbage is better than a great big one. It's more manageable that way. So in they go, right up to the lowest leaf like this, and then push the soil back. Now unlike many other crops, cabbage is like a really firm soil as I said, so don't be afraid to kind of push in quite nicely like that. By having their roots nice and firmed in like that, it'll actually help them to produce firmer, tighter heads, also known as hearts. Cabbages aren't an especially fussy crop, but just keep them well watered in dry weather, especially while they are young. Now this is a quite a thirsty cool season crop, so I'll be checking these plants at least once a week, especially during the summer, and giving them a really good deep soaking to keep them happy, to help them establish. Weeds can develop undetected beneath the developing head, so go in from time to time to pull out any you come across to minimize competition. I also like to pull off any dead or yellowed leaves as I pass through, to keep the soil nice and clean so there's less risk of disease, and to remove potential hiding places for slugs and snails. The biggest challenge when growing cabbages though is probably pigeons, as well as the caterpillars of the cabbage white butterfly, also known as cabbage worms. Other caterpillars can be a nuisance too, including cabbage loopers and the little caterpillars of the diamondback moth. Let me show you what I mean. Now look at this leaf here, it's got holes all over it, and we can see the little culprits here, these tiny caterpillars. Now these are cabbage white caterpillars local to my area, there are two different types. The other ones are sort of little green ones, and then over here, if I snap this leaf off, you can see the eggs. They're actually quite pretty, you've got these lovely kind of little orangey ones here. Now the reason that these are kind of quite badly affected and these aren't, is because I've got this lovely vegetable cage here over which I throw my netting, and it's done a pretty good job at keeping most of the butterflies out, so these guys have got a bit dog-eared and these ones haven't. The butterfly netting just fits neatly over this vegetable cage, and then it's got these little hooks here that you just clip the netting onto to hold it down nice and taut. Now I must be a bit more thorough because I still get the occasional butterfly that gets in there. If you don't have the money for an expensive cage, then you can just improvise. Use nut right like this, pop over a bottle and then throw your cover and put these at sort of regular intervals along the corners and sides. Now these are still quite small, my little plants, so I'm going to make a sort of little arch for them like this, and then I'm going to just put my netting over the top like that. What I'm doing here is I'm using actually an insect mesh which will not only keep the butterflies out, but also things like aphids and those pesky little flea beetles. Make sure that you properly make it airtight if you like, by using rocks to go all the way around to keep it close to the ground so they can't get in from underneath, and actually you could use something like a plank of wood to furl the material around and then hold it in place so it's completely flat, but I think that there is a pretty good job. The best bit about covering your crops with netting or insect mesh is that it also keeps the birds off. Now pigeons are absolutely everywhere in my garden and I just couldn't grow anything in the cabbage family without netting. Pigeons are my arch nemesis, but netting is my defender, and if you'd like more on defending your crops, not just cabbage but others from all sorts of pests, then I will link to our video on natural pest control in the description below. I've been keeping these cabbages ticking over so I can show you what I reckon is the best time to harvest them. Now in theory you can harvest your cabbages at any point, you can eat them as microgreens after all. You may want to harvest one or two quite young when they're still quite open to enjoy, to avoid a glut and to spread out your harvest, but this guy here is just about perfect. It's got a good firm tight head in the hand there, and well, it's looking sublime. So just go in there with a pair of pruners or secateurs or a sharp knife and give it a good clean cut, isn't that satisfying? Let's move it away, look at that, isn't that a beaut? But we're not done yet though, make the cut high enough right up to the base of the cabbage and you'll be left with quite a long stump like this. Now this has the potential to produce a smaller but secondary crop of leaves. If you think about it, it's had its whole life to produce a good old root system, so it's going to be raring to go to push out new leaves. It's like an old friend really, we've been with it, nurturing it for several weeks, and we might as well get a secondary crop of leaves, why not? And they'll come within just about a month or so. To help with this, I'm going to score a half an inch or one centimeter deep cross right in the center of our stump like that. Sort of a bit of an odd thing to do, but it does actually encourage those leaves to come on a bit sooner. Now let's give our harvested and scored stumps a good drink of water just to get them powered away and on to active growth again, and we can expect those leaves quite soon as I say. What a welcome little bonus! Store your harvested cabbages in a cool dark place such as a garage or indeed a fridge. Now some winter varieties will store for several weeks, even months, ensuring there's always something to tuck into. And of course you can slice up your cabbage, then freeze it, pickle it, or even ferment it into something totally delicious. You'll find a range of cabbages in our garden planner by the way, which you can select and just drop into your plan at the click of a mouse or the swipe of a finger. All very handy. Try the garden planner today by just following the links over there. I'll catch you next time.