The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Cabbage as a centerpiece
Vegetable is good for more than just a side dish.
Cabbage could qualify as the perfect vegetable for a pandemic. Sturdy cabbage, whether green, red, savoy or napa, will keep in your refrigerator for weeks, ready at a moment’s notice to serve as a salad, cooked vegetable, or even main dish. Instead of corned beef and cabbage for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day meal, how about cabbage as the centerpiece of your dinner?
Mark Capps grew up in Loganville, the third generation of a family of farmers. He remembers eating cabbage in two traditional Southern sides: stewed cabbage cooked in butter, with plenty of black pepper, and in coleslaw. But, he said, cabbage is good for more than just serving as a side dish. “I know people make cabbage rolls and that kind of thing.”
Capps’ family has a long tradition of farming, with a dairy farm in Dekalb County and a vegetable farm in Gwinnett County, off Rosebud Road, many years ago. His great uncle, Woodrow Cheek, had 23 acres, and sold vegetables off his truck. His grandfather, Emmett Capps, was a gentleman farmer, with 4 acres, where he raised animals and vegetables in Loganville, just three houses down from where Capps now lives and farms.
“I remember my grandfather coming in from doing the detailed woodwork for the fancy Pullman train cars in Atlanta, putting on his overalls and hitting the garden until dark,” Capps said. “My dad learned from him, and would put on his overalls when he got in from work, and hit the garden. Dad had three different gardens on the family land, and that’s where I learned to garden.”
One of the things he planted as a child was cabbage. He still grows it, although now it’s for the customers of Straight From the Backyard Farm.
Capps didn’t set out to be a farmer. However, the family tradition was strong. And, his backyard garden, once meant to provide vegetables for him and his girlfriend, Lynn Teddlie, grew and expanded, until the couple began growing on 4 acres and selling the extra produce to local restaurants, as well as at farmers markets.
The pandemic has been tough on the restaurant business, but Capps said he appreciates that customers like the Chastain in Atlanta, and the Butcher the Baker and Crooked Tree Cafe in Marietta, bought from the farm throughout the season. His participation at farmers markets dropped down to just two, the Saturday Marietta Square Farmers Market and the Thursday online Tucker Farmers Market.
Through it all, Capps has continued to grow cabbage. Experience has taught him that growing napa cabbage in northeast Georgia is tough. Aphids love those fleshy leaves, and the loose structure of the heads means a frost easily can knock down the crop.
But bronco, a beautiful, green cabbage with firm round heads, has done well for him. “We like it, because we can space out the plants and grow heads as large as 7 or 8 pounds, or we can plant it closer, and get 2- or 3-pound heads,” he said. “We’ve found there’s not a big market here for those huge cabbage heads that are 10 to 15 pounds. Our farmers market customers really like those smaller heads.”
Speaking of really big cabbages, he noted that Alaska is a major grower, and “that’s where they can grow huge 100-pound heads of cabbage. Their growing season is only four months, but really long days make for perfect growing conditions.”
Capps grows red cabbage, too; his favorite variety is ruby perfection. Red cabbage takes much longer to grow, so usually is more expensive. “I can have heads of green cabbage in 65 days, but it takes red cabbage 120 days to grow to a similar size,” Capps said.
Also, red cabbage is a chameleon, changing color depending on what it’s cooked with. For a fun science experiment, drop some vinegar or lemon juice into the purple juice after boiling a red cabbage, and it will turn red. Drop in baking soda, and it will turn a bluish-green. Keep this in mind the next time you’re cooking red cabbage, and want to it to be a bright red color.
Capps also grows savoy king, perhaps the prettiest cabbage, with its beautifully textured, dark green outer leaves. It doesn’t make up a huge percentage of what he grows, but his customers love it when it comes to market. Like napa cabbage, though, the loose texture of the heads means it’s easily burned by frost. And, like napa, the bugs enjoy it as much as his customers do. Too long in the field, and the leaves start getting damaged and the head can begin to rot from the cold.
He has some cabbage available now, the last of his late-summer plantings. He started harvesting smaller heads around the first week of November, and now is selling red cabbage. “We’ll be putting in a spring crop soon,” he said, “and that cabbage should be ready the first of May. You could grow cabbage all year-round here, if the bugs didn’t destroy everything in the summer.”