How to grow Winter Cabbage
Are you looking how to grow Winter Cabbage? Or are you looking at how to store or look after Winter Cabbage? Here we will provide you with all the information you need for getting the perfect Winter Cabbage on your allotment or in the garden.
Allotment and Kitchen Garden Book
Are you starting an allotment or planning on growing your own fruit, vegetables, herbs, and flowers in a kitchen garden? If so we highly recommend the book Allotment Month By Month. This does exactly what it does on the cover to help you with what you should be doing in the allotment and kitchen garden each month. Below you can see the link for Amazon where you can purchase the book directly. This book is extremely popular with all allotment holders as you will read in the reviews:-
You can check out all the allotment and kitchen garden books we recommend here.
Varieties of Winter Cabbage
The best varieties of winter cabbage are:-
Purchase Winter Cabbage Seeds
You can purchase Winter Cabbage Seeds from the images below direct from Amazon where you know it will be safe and secure to get them from:-
When to sow, plant and harvest Winter Cabbage
Here we provide the details of when to sow, plant and harvest winter cabbage here in the UK
| Sow | April – May |
| Plant | June – July |
| Harvest | November to March |
How to Sow Winter Cabbage
To sow Winter Cabbage you first need some small plant pots or seed tray – ideally a seed tray. Put a layer of compost in the seed tray on the base. Cabbage seed packets usually have hundreads of seeds in a pack you will only need a few seeds not the full packet.
Sprinkle the seeds evenly across the compost so they are not close together. Cover the seeds with another layer of compost and sprinkle the compost with water. Make sure you use a watering can with sprinkler on the end. You do not want to drown the seeds.
Now you can cover the seeds with a propagate or I use a layer of cling film to keep them warm and moist. Store your seeds in a light warm place like a greenhouse so that the cabbage seeds germinate.
When the seeds have germinated and the plants are big enough to handle they can be moved into there own individual plant pots. You can start the seeds off in individual plant pots but if the seeds don’t germinate you will have used a lot of compost. Keep the plant pots in the greenhouse and keep the plants watered so that they keep on growing.
How to transplant Winter Cabbage
When your Winter cabbage plants are big enough to handle and have 6 leafs on them they can be transplanted to the outdoors in there final growing place. When you are thinking of transplanting them you need to make sure that they have been watered well the day before so they do not die during transplanting. When you are planting them they need to be planted around 45 cm apart.
How to look after your Winter Cabbage
To look after cabbage you can water them every 10 days. If you feed them with a fertilizer that is high nitrogen they will create nice big heads and will be show stopper cabbages.
How to Harvest Cabbage
When your cabbages are big enough and ready to harvest the best way to harvest your cabbage is to cut them off at the stem with a sharp knife. Be careful when using sharp knives and scissors.
Cabbage pests
There are many types of cabbage pests that can attack your plants these are some of them and how to prevent them:-
Snails and Slugs:- Slugs and snails like to attack young cabbage plants as they are growing. To protect them you can use many sort of traps including beer traps, coffee granules, egg shells.
Caterpillars:- these can be quite a pest when it comes to cabbages. It’s not the caterpillars you need to look out for but the butterflies. They will lay the eggs on the leaves then the caterpillars hatch which then has them all eating the plant. The cabbages can be protected by using fine netting over the plants to stop the butterflies. If you cannot use netting make sure you keep checking for eggs on the plants and get rid of any that you find.
Cabbage Root Fly:- These will attack the roots of the plants as the name says. The way to protect them is to use the fine mesh netting to protect the plants from these.
We hope you have found these tips useful on how to grow cabbage and the best varieties. If you would like to find out more tips and advice you can find out here.
