Essentials when Growing Cabbages

Essentials when Growing Cabbages

The past few months have been a tireless education in growing Cabbages.  Nairobi enjoys a mixed sunny and rainy season between the months of October to January.  We planted a cabbage patch, a head count of around 1,000 cabbages.  Cabbages are a great vegetable to have at the table, easy to cook, nutritious and can be eaten raw and in salads.

We’re currently on the fourth month with the cabbages.  They have curled into cabbage heads and require a lot of weeding.  Here are a few essentials we’ve found in the past few months that will help you while growing cabbages.

Essentials:

1. Preparation:  When you’re planting your cabbages, plan out your garden in advance.  Space your cabbages appropriately, leave sufficient space for you to navigate through the cabbage patch.
2. Plenty of Water: Cabbages love water.  Make sure it’s accessible and water them daily or on a schedule.  It’s great when you have an irrigation system; this helps you manage the watering.  But if you don’t, plan time to water your young cabbages.
3. Pests: Cut worms, aphids, birds they love newly planted cabbages.  Monitor your crops on a daily basis, aphids under the leaves, cut worms in the soil.  Be diligent because the cut worms cut the stems on the young cabbages in the soil.  You find a withered plant.
4. Minerals & Nutrients: Keep the soil healthy for your cabbages.  Improve phosphorus and nitrogen levels.  Organically, increasing healthy micro organisms in the soil, using compost manure, worm castings or chemically using fertilizers like CAN and DAP.
5. Weeding: Keep your cabbage patch neat.  You’re more likely to spot the pests both animal, insects and humans if your cabbage patch is clean and you can see each cabbage head.

Remove the sickly leaves on the cabbages to prevent the spread of leaf diseases. To encourage healthy leaves to grow. We do this on a daily basis, just do a walk through of the cabbage patch and check the cabbages, especially the leaves closest to the ground.


Most of all, have fun taking care of your cabbage patch.  Look forward to a healthy harvest.

How to create a Short Hedge in your Flower Garden

How to create a Short Hedge in your Flower Garden

We’ve been growing a hedge for the past ten months or so using non-perennial ornamental bushes. We’re hoping to make it a small hedge that surrounds our flower garden.  The purpose of this hedge will be to discourage people from stepping on the flowers growing in the garden.  This morning, we spent a few moments trimming the plants so that they would grow in a straight line.  We also put in posts and wire that will help guide the bushes to grow to the height we are targeting.

Posts - Reused wood

Trimming Scissors

Things we needed:

6 posts- can be used wooden sticks.

Wire

Trimming Scissors

Procedure:

1. Make sure your garden is free of weeds first.  This way it will be easier to work with the plants.
2. Measure the size you want your fence to grow into.  Our height goal is 3”, so we measured the posts to be 5” tall.
3. Dig holes according to the length of your garden and how far your fence is.  For us we needed 6 posts, for 6 holes along the fence.  The distance between each post is at your discretion.  The depth of the holes was 2” inches.
4. Put your posts in to the holes, and make sure they are firm. 
5. Tie the wire along the posts at the height you want your fence to reach.
6. Weave the branches into the wires.  This will direct your plant to grow along the wire, and any branches straying away above the wire, get to be trimmed.

This picture on the left is the end result.  This activity makes it easier to trim the branches of the plants as they grow into the wires creating the small hedge below.

Short Hedge