Gadenin日本語Get the appJudge it by firmness, not by size
Press down on the top of the head with the flat of your hand. A cabbage ready to cut resists firmly and feels dense and heavy for its size, like a ball rather than a bundle of leaves. If it gives easily under your palm, the head is still filling and another week or two will add real weight. Size alone tells you nothing: a compact head from a tight spacing can be fully mature at half the diameter of a loose one that is still not ready.
From transplant to a cut head is roughly 60 days for an early type and up to 100 days for a late storage type, and cool weather stretches that out. Once a head is solid, check it weekly, because a mature cabbage standing in the ground through heavy rain is the classic candidate for splitting.
| Test | Not ready | Ready to cut |
|---|---|---|
| Press with the palm | Gives easily, feels hollow | Firm and unyielding |
| Weight in the hand | Light for its size | Noticeably dense |
| Outer wrapper leaves | Still tight around the head | Starting to peel back and open |
| Top of the head | Rounded and soft | Flattening slightly, tight leaf edges |
Cutting it cleanly
Cut with a sharp knife through the stem just below the head, leaving two or three of the large outer leaves attached to the head. Those wrapper leaves protect the head from bruising in handling and they slow moisture loss in storage. You strip them off in the kitchen; they cost you nothing and they buy you a week of shelf life.
Cut in the morning while the plant is cool and full of water. A cabbage cut in the afternoon heat has already lost moisture and goes limp faster. Do not wash the head before storing it: surface water sitting between the outer leaves is exactly what starts soft rot.
- Cut low, through the stem One clean cut through the stem just under the head. Sawing at it with a blunt blade crushes the stem and bruises the base of the head.
- Keep two or three wrapper leaves Leave the outermost intact leaves on for storage and strip them in the kitchen. They take the bruising instead of the head.
- Get it out of the sun immediately Move cut heads into shade as you go. Twenty minutes lying in full sun costs you days of storage life.
A second crop from the stump
Leave the stump and its lower leaves in the ground after cutting an early or midseason cabbage and, if the season has enough time left in it, dormant buds around the cut will push out a cluster of small new heads. Each one gets to about the size of a tennis ball, and a good stump gives you four to six of them over the following six to eight weeks.
To encourage it, cut a shallow cross into the top of the stump with a knife and give the plant a light nitrogen feed and a good watering. Then thin the resulting shoots to the strongest three or four, because a stump that tries to carry ten shoots produces ten useless ones. This only works while the weather is still suitable for growth, so it is worth doing after an early crop and not worth doing after the last cutting of the season.
- Cut a cross in the stump Score a shallow cross about half an inch (1 cm) deep across the cut surface. Buds break more freely around the cuts.
- Feed and water A light nitrogen feed and a thorough watering wakes the stump up. Without it most stumps just sit there and rot.
- Thin to three or four shoots When the shoots are a couple of inches long, rub off all but the three or four strongest. Those will make usable small heads.
Pull the stump out the moment it stops producing. Old brassica stumps left in the ground over winter are where clubroot and cabbage root fly carry over to next season's crop.
Storing whole heads
A firm, undamaged, late-season cabbage keeps remarkably well: two to three months at temperatures just above freezing with high humidity, which in practice means the bottom of a fridge, an unheated shed or a cool cellar. Early cabbage does not store like that at all, and a fortnight is realistic. Store the head loosely wrapped so the surface can breathe, and check it over every couple of weeks, pulling off any outer leaf that has gone soft.
The other traditional method is to leave the plants where they are and cut as needed, which works well in cool weather and not at all once it turns warm or wet. If you have to lift a whole row at once, hang the plants upside down by the root in a frost-free shed and they hold for weeks.
| Method | Conditions | How long it keeps |
|---|---|---|
| Whole head, loosely wrapped, refrigerated | Just above freezing, high humidity | Two to three months for late types |
| Whole head in a cool shed | Cool, frost free, dark | Four to six weeks |
| Cut half, wrapped, refrigerated | Cut face covered | About a week |
| Shredded and frozen after blanching | Blanched two minutes, cooled, bagged | Several months, for cooking only |
What to record at harvest
Note the date you cut each head, its weight and the date you planted that position. Those three numbers give you your own days-to-harvest figure, which is the single most useful thing for planning next year, and they show you plainly whether the spacing you chose gave you the size of head you actually wanted.
It is also worth noting how many heads split or bolted and roughly when. Those failures cluster around particular weather, and once you can see that heads standing in the ground past a certain point in the season reliably split, the fix writes itself: cut a week earlier next time.