This year each student in Penguin Girl's class was given a cabbage seedling to grow at home. The seedlings were provided by Bonnie Plants as part of a program to teach 3rd graders about the plant cycle. The variety of cabbage meant that if you took care of your plant well, you would end up with a giant cabbage. The program's promotional materials included photos of kids who had successfully grown their humongous cabbage. Penguin Girl was very excited to get started. Back in March, I let her take over one of my garden squares since she hoped her cabbage would grow as big as possible.
After a few weeks, it was obvious that bugs were chomping away at the cabbage plant. The plant looked pretty sad when we got back from our trip to New York for spring break. She asked how we could keep the bugs from eating the plant. Car Guy told her we'd need to use pesticide. She looked like she was going to cry and said, "But I really wanted to grow an organic cabbage!" That's my Penguin Girl.
I consulted someone at a local organic gardening center and got an organic pesticide. It contains some sort of bacteria that you spray onto the cabbage. When the bugs continue to eat the cabbage, the bacteria interferes with their digestion and they die. It worked somewhat but did not completely kill off all the bugs.
In the end, we harvested a 17-pound cabbage. I geared up with a whole bunch of cabbage recipes in anticipation of having all that cabbage to prepare all at once. But alas, the interior of the cabbage was full of slugs and millipedes. I decided it was too gross to take inside to chop off the buggy bits to get at the nice parts so we composted it. Well, we composted half of it and then had to stop because the compost bin was pretty full. Then Mr. Destructo hacked away at what remained of the head of cabbage over the next few days. Then we composted the rest. Nevertheless, Penguin Girl was pretty pleased to have grown such a big cabbage.
