How to Grow Cabbage: A Complete Organic Growing Guide

Cabbage is the perfect addition to any home garden because there's a type of cabbage for everyone! Think of versatile chinese cabbage varieties, vibrant red to purple varieties, and crisp green cabbage adding both visual appeal and hearty, robust flavor to your culinary creations. 

This must-grow plant is packed with antioxidants and nutrients for a health-conscious diet. But it can be finicky to grow regarding soil, watering, and pests. 

If you want to learn how to grow cabbage like a pro, I won’t leaf out any details. So grab your cabbage seeds and let's dig in!

Get an Organic Garden Growing!

Spring is the perfect time of year to brush up on your knowledge of growing techniques. Here at MIgardener, I like to share all of our best growing practices and growing secrets, from our garden to yours. 

I hope you’ll utilize this blog post and others like it to learn, not just about cabbage, but how to grow radishes, how to grow horseradish, how to grow lettuce, how to grow peas, and more. As you read through these posts, you'll find that its not so difficult to grow organic!

Types of Cabbage

Cabbage is a versatile veggie with a range of different varieties and uses. There are two main types of cabbage: loose heading and hard heading, in colors ranging from dark green to purple and even white. 

There is also seasonality difference between varieties that coincides with how many days it takes for the cabbage variety to form a head. 

• Early-Season Varieties - These varieties mature in 65 to 70 days. Early-season cabbage is the sweetest, but has the shortest shelf life. This includes varieties like Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage. 
• Mid-Season Varieties - These varieties mature in 70 to 75 days like the Charleston Wakefield Cabbage.
• Late-Season Varieties - These varieties mature in 80 to 85 days or more. Late-season cabbage, like the Late Flat Dutch Cabbage, is cold-hardy and is perfect for storage. Late-season cabbages often have such tightly packed heads that they can last up to three months in the refrigerator crisper!

Best Time For Planting Cabbage

You can plant cabbage in two different planting seasons: spring planting for a summer harvest and late summer planting for a late fall harvest. Plant both times for two successions of cabbage. While you can sow any variety of cabbage in the spring, I recommend exclusively planting early season varieties in a fall garden. 

I prefer to start Brassicas like broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage indoors in the spring, 2 to 4 weeks before the last estimated frost date and move them out into the garden as seedlings. Don’t wait too long to transplant these outdoors, or they will start to grow, the weather will get too warm, and they will yield a small harvest! 

You can also sow cabbage indoors or directly in the garden in late summer for a fall garden. To determine when to sow seeds for a fall garden, look at the back of your cabbage seed packet to see the days to germination and days to maturity for that variety- add those together. Count back that number of days from your area's first estimated freeze date to find your planting day.

Pak Choi White Stem Cabbage is my all-time favorite cabbage variety to grow in the fall! It is incredibly sweet, tender, and moisture-rich, plus it can be harvested at any stage, even when it is small. 

Copenhagen Market Cabbage is another great choice for the fall garden. I will get 25% to 30% larger heads of cabbage just by growing these in the fall garden! Both varieties can be harvested late into fall, sometimes even early winter, thanks to their tolerance of cold down to 20°F. 

Best Soil For Growing Cabbage

The first step to growing cabbage successfully is understanding its soil needs. Aim for a soil that is fertile and compacted. This is where a lot of gardeners go wrong! 

Cabbage is a Brassica, and like all Brassicas, it prefers a more compact soil. Not so compact that you could make pottery out of it, but I’m talking about soil without air gaps that is compressed but can be easily broken apart.

That is because any Brassica, especially cabbage, is very prone to root knot nematodes, which thrive in aerated, fertile soil. For this reason, I plant cabbage in a location in my garden where the soil has settled and has not been recently amended with a lot of compost.

Reducing air gaps and compacting the soil around the roots has been proven by many different soil scientists to reduce the risk of root knot nematodes by up to 75%!

How to Plant Cabbage

Follow these steps to plant cabbage seedlings:

1. Sunlight - Cabbages need at least 5-8 hours of daily sun for better leaf growth and healthy heads, and if you give them more than that, they won’t complain! They can thrive with 11 to 12 hours of full direct sunlight.

2. Dig a Hole - Use your garden trowel to dig a hole larger than the roots of the seedling.

3. Fertilize the Soil - Add fertilizer to the hole. Cabbage requires nitrogen-rich fertilizer because nitrogen is vital for leaf growth, which will make larger, tighter heads. I apply Trifecta+ to the soil at planting. Pro-Tip: Do not use a fertilizer so strong that it can burn your plants! I have seen a lot of gardeners use urea, which is 60% by weight of nitrogen, and it's very harsh. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing in this case. That’s why I prefer something gentle and well-balanced like Trifecta+.

4. Planting Depth - Plant the seedling at the original soil level and backfill the hole with soil.

5. Compact Soil - Using your first or palm, press firmly on the soil around the newly planted cabbage seedling to compact the soil all around it. To grow the best cabbages, the soil needs to be 50% more compacted than for other crops, which will reduce the risk of root knot nematodes. Pro Tip: Don’t plant cabbage in heavy clay soil without first amending it. If you plant cabbage in clay soil and compact it, the roots will suffocate, and the plant will die.

6. Plant Spacing - Space cabbages about 10 inches apart to allow enough room for their large leaves to develop and gently overlap. If cabbages are planted too close together, they will compete, trample, and overshadow other plants. Pro-Tip: Ten-inch spacing is close enough that the plants will shade the soil, keeping it cooler and moister, which will reduce stress on the plants and reduce weeds.
   

7. Intercropping - I alternate planting green and purple cabbage in my beds because there is quite a bit of evidence that intercropping different cabbage colors actually helps reduce cabbage moths! I also recommend planting marigolds between cabbages and I’ll explain why later on.

8. Water - Cabbages love water and require more than other Brassicas, about 1 to 2 inches of water per week. It is very important to check your soil and water when your plants need it. Letting them get too dry is a really bad thing for cabbage and can lead to things like head rot.

Pro-Tip: Did you know that you can also plant cabbage and harvest it as microgreens?! Here's more on growing microgreens.

How to Grow Cabbage

Cabbage is a leafy green crop, which means they take tons of nitrogen. You should fertilize at planting, and apply fertilizer again mid-season, 6-8 weeks later, especially if there has been a lot of rain. 

If you are using high-intensity planting methods, like I am, the soil will be depleted faster. It is harder to fertilize the soil mid-season because not much soil is exposed, so now I turn to fish emulsion or compost tea!

I use 2 tablespoons of fish emulsion fertilizer diluted in a 1 gallon watering can full of water every time I water my cabbage plants. This provides the readily accessible nitrogen that they’re looking for.

Deterring Pests on Cabbages

It’s very important to control pests before they become a big problem on cabbages. That’s where marigolds come in!

I recommend planting marigolds throughout the garden, especially in close proximity to cabbage. Intercropping marigolds with crops can reduce root-knot nematodes by up to 50% because marigolds excrete a chemical into the soil that prevents them. Michigan State University conducted a study on this and found it to be highly effective.

In addition to intercropping, I use an organic pesticide called BT (Bacillus Thuringiensis). BT is a beneficial bacterium that you spray onto the leaves of your plants to stop the lifecycle of pesky caterpillars and other chewing insects like cabbage moths, tomato hornworms, or tent caterpillars on fruit trees.

The final pest control method I use on cabbage will surprise you: tulle! Yep, the lightweight sheer fabric used to make tutus can be draped over your plants as a physical barrier to keep things like cabbage moths and flea beetles from getting into them!

I hope you enjoyed this and learned something new today that helps you grow bigger!

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