50 million pounds of cabbage

Jim Randall of Elk Run Farm, Fort Defiance 

It seemed like that much when I started to grate the vegetables in my kitchen, but that’s actually the total weight of the cabbages Virginia growers haul to market almost year round. In Southwest Virginia, cabbage ripens in early summer; on the Eastern Shore, growers are just now starting to cut the thick stalks of fall cabbages for their second harvest. The distinctive fragrance of cooking cabbage (my Irish grandmother would say cooking “odors” and worry that her kitchen smelled like a “cheap boarding house”) has permeated many centuries of old-world cottages, new-world tenements and narrow Chinatown streets.  Modern science confirms its cancer-fighting ability and its historic value as a source of vitamin C in winter, once people learned how to preserve it with vinegar or salt.

In the Shenandoah Valley, cabbage is still holding on where it’s protected from the one sub-20-degree night we’ve had, and I bought ten or so fat heads, along with some peppers and onions, from Sue and Jim Randall of Elk Run Farm on the last day of the Staunton-Augusta Farmer’s Market. Sue spent many dreary years running a sewing machine and dreaming of being outside in the sunshine instead of inside a Martinsville factory. A few years ago, the success of the farmers market allowed her to spend her daylight hours in gardens and cold frames, working for her own business. Jim, who manages the field crops and fixes the machinery, works by day at Augusta Equipment and, if all goes well, will soon join her full time at Elk Run Farm.