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.

Jade Vermi Composting Project

Facts about Composting and Organic farming

1. Composting is a key ingredient in Organic farming.
1. We use organic matter like vegetable and fruit peels, plant leaves and stalks, and food waste to create compost. The decayed matter that comes from gives us fertilizer to use in our soil to enrich it with nutrients.

Using chemicals in soil destroys the good micro organisms that help our plants to grow healthily so we opt to use Composting. We're always excited to learn new ways of improving our soil. This blog introduces to you our new skill, learned from a very cool, awesome guy who does Vermi Composting.

We have recently learned about Vermi Composting. 

What is Vermi Compost?

-        This is using earthworms to create nutrient rich organic fertilizers and soil conditioner.

Why use Vermi Compost?

-        It helps improve soil structure.

-        Improves water holding capacity.

-        Enriches soil in micro-organisms

-        Attract deep burrowing earthworms already present in soil

-        It enhances germination, plant grown and crop yield

-        Improving root germination

The soil turns a dark black color that absorbs water readily

Jade Vermi Composting Project

Here at Jade Gardens, we have started our own Vermi Compost project. We want to try out Vermi Composting. We are always learning new techniques to improve our organic farming. We'll share this new experience with you as we learn a new way of improving our soil using Vermi Compost! For the next 60 days, we’re going to log in our progress on our blog. Stay tuned as we embark on our own vermi composting adventure. 

Did you know?

A worm has no arms, legs or eyes.

What we need: 

1. A box to keep our earthworms warm and working through the night. 

2. Some earthworms. We'll go on an earthworm hunt around our farm.

3. A warm dark area to keep our worms.

Next Week:

We'll show you pictures of our set up!

Stay tuned.