The Bulletin. 13 



produce early cabbage, light, sandy soils are used that are underlaid 

 with clay. Peat or swamp soils will produce large cabbage, but unless 

 properly fertilized with commercial fertilizers the heads are apt to be 

 leafy and soft. Muck soils are valuable for raising late cabbage, which 

 grow slowly' all summer. In the eastern part of the State, where early 

 spring cabbage alone is grown, the lighter soils are preferred because 

 they tend to hasten the early maturity of the crop. 



In the eastern sections cabbage plants are set in the field in November 

 and December. They go through the mild winter, growing slowly, and 

 then head up rapidly in the early spring. The seed to produce the 

 plants is sown in latter September and early October, when the weather 

 has become cool. It takes about six weeks in ordinary weather to pro- 

 duce plants large enough for setting in the field. Owing to vicissi- 

 tudes of heat and drought in the fall, growers who produce their own 

 cabbage plants make two or three plantings of seed and set out from 

 the one that has made the best plants. The seed-bed should be made 

 on well-drained, fertile land, but the bed should not be manured or 

 fertilized so as to make soft, succulent plants. The seed should be 

 sown thinly in rows 12 inches apart, crossways of the seed-bed. If 

 the plants are too small at transplanting time, they will not make 

 good, firm heads later. If they become too large, they make so much 

 of their first year's growth before winter that in spring they start into 

 their second biennial period and shoot up to seed instead of making 

 heads. On this account many growers do not attempt to raise their 

 own plants, but buy them at setting time from some of those places 

 whose regularity of climate affords special facilities for the production 

 of hardy, well-grown, stocky plants. 



Though the cabbage plant requires a great deal of moisture, it will 

 not do well on wet or undrained land. For this reason, on flat lands 

 which do not drain fast, some growers make a practice of listing up 

 the land and setting the plants on the ridges. As a protection against 

 injury from repeated freezing and thawing, other growers ridge up 

 their land, running the rows east and west and set the plants low down 

 on the north side of the ridge. 



As the cabbage plant is a gross feeder, it needs abundance of manure 

 and fertilizers. As manure is always too scarce with truck growers, 

 its deficiency should be made up by the plowing in of heavy crops of 

 cowpeas. In addition to the manure and cowpeas, a high-grade fertil- 

 izer should be added at the rate of one to two tons per acre, according 

 to the richness of the land. A formula much used by cabbage growers 

 is 7-7-7. 



As the cabbage crop is often attacked by fungous diseases which 

 infest the soil, it is not wise to have cabbage following cabbage very 

 often on the same land. As in the east the cabbage crop comes off 

 the land early in spring, a variety of truck or farm crops can con- 

 veniently follow it and benefit by the residual fertility left over from 

 the cabbage crop. 

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