here are some tips to grow fresh delicious
and healthy cabbage very easily in your garden
music]
I always recommend growing cabbage from seed
the reason for starting cabbages from seeds
is that you can not only get a head start
to grow cabbage but also the fact that cabbage
transplant very easily
So cabbage being a cool-season crop you would generally start it
a little bit before the fall season
about six weeks before the fall season in your area
you can also start cabbages in early spring
and it goes great thru early summer
So once the seedlings emerge
you can grow up to two seedlings in a
container of this size
Or if you're using a 16-inch container
I would advise growing just one plant per container
if you plant the seedlings too close
you will end up getting smaller heads of cabbage
as you will see towards the end of this video
and if you're growing in raised beds
I would advise growing about 9 cabbages
in a four by four foot bed
Now one of the most common predators for
cabbage is the cabbage fly
which is actually a butterfly that lays its eggs
inside the cabbage plant
which results in caterpillar or loopers or
cabbage worms that eat the cabbage plant
and can cause a lot of devastation
So to counter that the easiest method
that you see here that I've used is to
keep a net around the cabbage
which will prevent the cabbage fly from
entering the cabbages
now you can see a little bit of damage that was done
earlier when the net wasn't put on the cabbage
but as soon as I put the Nets on the cabbage
it made no difference to the cabbages that were growing
but the cabbage fly was never able to fly and enter into the cabbages
so i never got any more caterpillars
however if you do see cabbage loopers or cabbage worms
you need to use either neem oil
or BT which is a naturally occurring bacteria
which will help protect your cabbage plants however
rather than spraying anything I would highly recommend that you try to use a
net
which is very effective in protecting
your cabbage plants now cabbage has a very
long growing season so once you
plant your cabbage seeds it might take up to four months
for the cabbage heads to start forming
and once the cabbage heads form what you need to do is
just feel around the head of the cabbage to make sure that the head is firm
if the heads are not firm the cabbage is not formed yet
so just feel a little bit around the head of the cabbage
and if it feels solid to the touch that's the time you can start harvesting
your cabbage
so we're gonna go ahead and harvest this cabbage its formed a decent sized head
and it's also firm to the touch
now cabbage requires full Sun
at least six to eight hours so make sure you're growing a cabbage in a sunny
area
so that you get really good cabbage heads
and if your cabbage is not forming
big heads it usually means that the temperatures in your area have warmed up
and cabbage needs a coll season like early spring
or fall season to really form good heads
So for this raised bed the cabbages that I've grown
have grown pretty well and as you can see the heads are pretty well sized
Let's take a closer look here so this is a pretty decent sized cabbage
now most of your head should be around this size
but if you get smaller sized heads it's usually because they've been placed too
close
and as you can see some of these heads not very big in size
because of the placement I placed
a lot more cabbages that I should have
and as you can see it this one again is
pretty firm so we will go ahead and harvest this Now as far as fertilizer
goes I have added a lot of compost into this raised bed
and I've used a liquid fertilizer
every two weeks for this cabbage
areal and it seemed to do a good job been going great cabbages for me on this
raised bed
So as you can see this is again a great
looking cabbage head cabbage is a very healthy for you
it tastes great in salads and even cooked
and this one also feels very firm to the touch
so we will go ahead and harvest this cabbage as well
and as you will see here
this cabbage head is
not as big as the other cabbage heads that we harvested
and that's again because of the spacing between the cabbages
so when you plant cabbages it might not be very obvious
but cabbages can grow to a very large size
and which is why it is very important that you space out your cabbages well
so this is an example of a small cabbage head
but it's also very delicious and fresh compared to the supermarket cabbage
now there's another variety of cabbage called the giant cabbage
and I have done a video on this cabbage variety in one of my earlier videos
which you can see by clicking on the screen link
which you see
and once again even for this giant cabbage variety
I'm growing only one cabbage plant per
this 16-inch container and it grows pretty fast as well
now the giant cabbage is just like the other cabbage variety that you see
however the heads that it forms
are much wider and larger compared to the regular cabbage
varieties now as you can see here you have some insect damage
on this cabbage plant and I did not use any kind of insecticides and pesticides
on this cabbage plant
and what happened was that the cabbage fly came in
laid some eggs on the leaves of this plant
and you can see that this plant has quite a lot of damage to its leaves
I really didn't think this cabbage plan would survive after all that damage
and this is why I would again like to stress
the importance of using the net to prevent the cabbage
fly from coming and laying eggs on your cabbage
but as you can see here as the cabbage plant grows and starts forming the
head
you can see that the insect damage becomes less prevalent
and starts to disappear as the cabbage starts
forming its head even further and at this stage the head is just begun to
form
and at this stage it is critical that you
continue to fertilize your plant to make sure
that you are meeting the that plant's nutritional requirements
Now this giant cabbage is growing
in about ninety percent of compost I used about 90 percent compost
10 percent of of potting soil
I realized that by using a lot of compost
I was able to grow a lot of great cabbage now this was planted on the
21st of October and as you can see it has grown
pretty well it needed some support because it was getting very heavy
and which is why I just used a stake to
secure it and you can see here
I am again going to touch and feel whether this cabbage head is formed
before deciding whether to harvest it so its now time to harvest this
plant
and let's look at how our harvest looks like
now the giant cabbages as you can see forms a really big
canopy a lot of leaves and when you actually harvest the cabbage the
head of the cabbage is actually much smaller than the canopy it forms
now you can actually eat the other leaves of the cabbage the ones that I'm
removing right now
they taste a little different though from
the cabbage itself so it's up to you whether you want to eat those leaves or
toss it into a compost pile
so whether you are growing the
regular cabbage variety or the giant cabbage variety
growing your own cabbages is a rewarding experience
so I want to know from you do you grow cabbage
and what is your favorite variety of cabbage to grow do let me know your
thoughts and opinions
and I'll see you again soon happy gardening
[music]