Speaking of growing enough to sell, I did a home visit the other day with a participant interested in the Farmer’s Market, that was wonderful. When I met James at the gate to his property, he asked me how long I had been in Kentucky. I said seven years and he replied, “You ain’t never been to a place like my place” and off we went to his property in the middle of a reclaimed strip mine. When we got to the acre he planned on using for his garden, we got to talking about his soil and what he had been doing to add organic matter and such. He has put in over 200 pickup truck size loads of manure and he and his six kids have pulled out several tons of rocks. “They grow in there” he remarked about the rocks and I have heard that from several of my gardeners.
Raised beds are probably not deep enough to store these cabbages. |
What I hadn’t heard before is how his daddy stores cabbages. James told me that he had plowed the garden spot real deep this time for his cabbages. When I asked him why he said, “to store them”. It seems that when the cabbages are ready to harvest, his father pulls them out, root and all, digs a hole where the cabbage was, puts it back in the hole head first, covers it with plastic, then covers them with dirt leaving the root exposed. James says they stay good all year and that burying them makes them sweeter. This is one harvesting method I am going to have to follow up on.
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