Cold, chilly and clammy? Plant some cabbages

There aren’t a lot of things that will positively thrive in the kind of weather we’ve had across the UK since April started, but cabbages are extremely hardy members of the brassica family, they are resilient and enjoy cold damp winters, and above all they are capable of withstanding low temperatures which would destroy many other crops, even while they are still at the seedling stage.

Because of all this, cabbages are easiest crops to grow – although getting people to eat them may be a different matter! If your children hate cabbage, they aren’t being difficult on purpose. Some young people have a tastebud receptor that responds to one of the key ingredients of cabbage as though it were rotten eggs (it is in fact a sulphur-based compound and as we all remember from school chemistry, sulphur smells a bit like bad eggs) and the interesting thing is while around 40% of the population have it, most of them find that particular receptor atrophies over time, so by the age of twenty or so, they don’t think cabbage is horrible any more! One way to help them get through this, if you’re determined they should eat their greens is to steam or stir-fry young cabbage, then serve it with toasted sesame oil and sesame nuts which counteracts the flavour. To get rid of the smell, chuck a handful of parsley into a small pan of boiling water and let the steam clear out the cabbagey odour – it really works.

Back to the allotment: any well drained ground suits a cabbage, but if possible dig in a goodly amount of manure several months before sowing and make a series of sowings from mid spring to early summer for successional harvesting.

Cabbages grown outdoors should be transplanted when four or five true cabbage leaves have appeared and they are greedy, so you need to give them plenty of water and plenty of fertiliser during the growing period.

Cabbages courtesy of jmurawksi

Labels: allotment-cabbage, allotment-planting

Winter Wonderlands

It’s such a shame when people don’t keep their allotments going through the winter, for two reasons:

1 - it makes it much more difficult for them to come back in spring and turn the ground etc because a whole winter’s worth of weeds and pests have taken over the ground

2 – they miss out on all the wonderful winter vegetables that they could be enjoying in the months when, in fact, vegetable costs rise and there is less variety in the shops anyway.

Our allotments are full of winter cabbages and kale, Brussels sprouts and, of course, the wonderful winter beets and chards. These have been a real development in recent years. Until quite recently, such crops were only grown to be fed to cattle, which is a complete waste as they are both tasty and nutritious and amazingly easy to grow. And a benefit in my eyes is their beauty – they gleam through the winter months like some kind of exotic growth transplanted from a warmer climate.

Most winter crops have definite advantages: there are far fewer slugs and snails around to attack them, and they are necessarily robust plants, needing very little care once they have established themselves past the seedling stage.

Labels: allotment-beets, allotment-brussels sprouts, allotment-cabbage, allotment-kale, allotment-winter-crops