Remember the cabbage seeds that I started indoors back in March?
Well, here they are now and they are ready to be transplanted in the ground!
I hardened them off by bringing them outside during the day and bringing them back in a night for a couple of days. On the third day I left them out all night. I’m no expert at hardening off plants, as I haven’t done a lot of it. I would imagine some other plants, like warmer season crops, may need a longer and more gradual hardening off, but a few days seemed fine for the cabbage.
This time of year, I try to do most of my watering, planting and transplanting in the morning, before the sun is directly overhead and before it gets to warm. Some plants, like peppers, stress easily from transplanting, so it is recommended you plant them in the evening. I bought some jalapeño and eggplant starts at the Seattle Tilth plant sale last weekend, so I transplanted those as the sun was going down and it was cooling off a bit. But for my cabbage, I transplanted them in the morning.
It said in my Rodale’s book that cabbage could be planted 6″- 12″ apart depending on how big I wanted them to get. If I planted them 6″ apart and then decided I wanted the heads to get a little bigger, I could pull (and eat) every other one and let the remaining heads get bigger. That’s kind of what I already do with my lettuce, and I had more starts than I needed, so I decided to go with the 6″ spacing.
I lined all the plants out how I wanted them spaced and then proceeded to transplanting.
I planted each start a little deeper in the ground than they were in the pot. Hopefully this will help the cabbages head up.
Here are all the cabbages tucked in their bed! They seem to be super hardy, as they don’t seemed stressed by being transplanted at all.
I’m one step closer to my homemade sauerkraut!