When it Comes to Cabbage, Bigger Could be Better

A giant cabbage at the Alaska State Fair in Palmer in 2009. Travis / Flickr
A giant cabbage at the Alaska State Fair in Palmer in 2009. Travis / Flickr

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

The United States has sometimes been said to follow the “bigger is better,” philosophy, from trucks to portions sizes. Well, why not apply that same idea to a slightly healthier American product? Like a vegetable. Or, specifically, a cabbage.

Midge Short is an enthusiastic grower of produce and hopes a little competition will encourage others to take up the hobby as well. She’s organizing a giant cabbage weigh-off at the Kodiak State Fair in September.

She says it’s something Palmer does at its state fair.

“A lot of growers compete each year and they take these giant vegetables and they have them weighed off and it’s a lot of fun. It’s great for the community. It’s been running in Palmer for a long time. Well, I thought that it would be a wonderful way to get the community and the children especially hooked into growing vegetables. What better way?”

The seed is called the Oversized Alaska Cabbage Giant Seed, which Short says is the same one growers in Palmer use.

“And they will typically just breed out the hybrid section of this cabbage so that they are just left with big, oversized cabbage seed that, each year they plant, they will be selectively choosing the biggest seed out of that stock.”

She says, in Kodiak, the cabbages could grow to be around 90 or 100 pounds.

And once they start to grow, Short says they’ll need rehousing in order to keep them happy and avoid them becoming too big for their pots.

“You will see typically that these cabbages are gonna grow very, very fast unlike your normal sized cabbage plant, so I would imagine that you would be wanting to, within a couple of weeks even, put it into a slightly larger pot with some more potting soil and then a few weeks after that, put it into an even larger pot.”

Short says growers should plant their seeds in mid-March.

Those seeds are available for free in both the villages and in the city through the Kodiak and Soil Water Conservation District.

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