Trevor's Kitchen Garden How I grow my own food and how you can too.

Early Monday 9th November, before the phones start ringing, I steel an hour in the garden to start a new generation of everlasting cabbage plants. (This is a perennial hardy kale-like heritage cabbage variety obtained from Irish Seedsavers in Scarriff, Co. Clare.)  Last spring I put up a video clip of cuttings being taken from the previous years cabbage plants. However I want to experiment and see if the cuttings will root and survive if I plant them now before winter sets in instead of waiting until next spring.

Last spring, I molly-coddled the cuttings by planting them in pots of soil and bringing them on in the glasshouse before planting out in late March. This time I’ll try putting them directly into their newly prepared growing patch. This patch provided a good crop of beans and peas in the summer just gone by. The withered legume vines have gone for composting, the soil levelled and some well broken down compost dug in. The nitrogen nodules on the remaining roots of the old legume plants will, I hope, feed the newly planted cabbage cuttings in the year ahead.

All I need to do now is to pull off the ready-to-use side shoots from the parent everlasting cabbage plant. I tidy up the base of each cutting with a sharp knife. A diagonal cut gives the cutting a sharp point. This point  is pushed gently in to the soft soil. I firm in the cuttings one by one and water – voila!