How to grow cabbages

Cabbage is a dense-headed cole crop that a gardener grows for the way it stores: once cured, a firm head holds in a root cellar or refrigerator for months, well past the season that grew it. It occupies a bed through most of spring or fall, building outer leaves for weeks before the head itself starts to tighten and round out. Gardeners lean on it for slaws, ferments, and braises that carry a household through winter, and its cool-season habit makes it a reliable bookend crop on either side of summer's heat-loving vegetables.

The hardest part of growing cabbage well is timing the harvest against the head itself, not the calendar. University of Georgia Cooperative Extension warns that leaving a cabbage head in the garden too long after it reaches full firmness causes it to split, especially once a heavy rain follows a dry spell and swells the core faster than the outer leaves can stretch. A second-year gardener who is proud of a large head and keeps waiting for it to grow even bigger comes back to find the crown cracked open, unusable for storage and good only for using right away.