Organic Cabbages - Grow Them By Stem Division

Cloning techniques have been much in the news but not many people know you can also clone many species of vegetable in your own garden - and produce entirely fresh varieties. What's more, they're safe to eat.

A simple and fun example is stem cloning. Most enthusiasts of organic vegetables, experimenting with new gardening ideas, have trimmed away tomato suckers, the little stems that grow between the main stems. They have put them into a pot of damp sand with a poly bag over the top and watched them grow into new plants.

That's useful early in the season when you want to bulk up your plants fast. It's a basic principle of intensive organic gardening. But did you know you can also do it with cabbages and similar brassica?

For this purpose, cut off the complete stems of a mature plant. Dip the cut ends in a rooting compound to stop rot. Our grandfathers used dry wood ashes or soot.

Some while later, plant them in a pot of sandy compost until the cutting grows fresh leaves. And set them in the garden. You will have an exact clone of the original cabbage.

Why should you bother to do this when cabbage seed is cheap? You might want to grow on a rare variety but to save cabbage seed pure to type is difficult. You have to wait for the second year until the plant forms seed because most brassica are biennials.

To keep a cabbage 'pure', it must be isolated from other varieties by at least one mile. Pollen from even wild turnips will pollute it.

But if you never let the seed head form, there's no danger.

Almost any variety of brassica works

This technique works with broccoli, cauliflower, collards, cabbage and kale. It won't with leafy vegetables like spinach or lettuce but they aren't brassica.

Strangely, not many modern gardening authors have heard of this trick - although it was familiar in Victorian times. The Gardener's Assistant 1871 dedicates a whole section to it.

Another tip used by ancient farmers was to dig up a brassica at the end of the year and slice it lengthwise into pieces, ensuring there were some roots on each piece.

The lengths were coated in soot or charcoal dust and dried. They could then be kept in a cool place in a pail of moist sand and planted out in spring. Mould permitting, they would form new plants.

So they didn't need seeds for the next season's crop!

Is that how they developed Brussel sprouts?

It's interesting to think that cloning - usually considered a new idea - was used around the 16th century to develop those brassica we now know so well - Brussels sprouts and the Savoy cabbage. They appeared in just a few years. How could gardeners keep these varieties pure and stabilize them - when cabbages will cross-pollinate so easily?

Maybe farmers saw a useful mutation occur - perhaps a cabbage that grew many heads instead of one. And they kept it going by stem division.

That sounds more likely than to suppose that farmers rigorously kept the novel varieties 2000 yards apart, in an age when pollination was not fully understood.

It's also sensible to assume that the experimental gardener would have attempted to clone a cabbage stem, given the considerable expertise they had at this time in grafting grape vines.

Today we know that we can propagate other species like aubergines, squash, peppers, tomatoes and potatoes by stem grafting to produce new plants. We can even graft comparable species on each other to produce totally new and exotic varieties. Not least, a peppergine or tomatogine!

Old time farmers did not have these exotic species, but we have them. Could we develop amazing new plants in our own gardens - merely by cloning common vegetables?


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Dr John Yeoman PhD is founder of the center for natural gardening ideas, the Gardening Guild. Discover dozens of clever tips to get more fun, food and profit in your garden with less money and labor in his big guide Lazy Secrets for Natural Gardening Success. Get it for free at:
http://www.gardeningguild.org/lazy