||Tell Us Your Favorite Vegetable farm, How It's Cultivated & The Cultural Practices To Improve It's Yield||

Hello again to everyone in this humble community @steemfarm-market. I must say that I really appreciate the vision of this community and the initiative set in place to achieve it. The contest I have taken part in this community has really opened my mind to certain things I would not have noticed at first and so for that, I commend the group moderators for the hard work.

Vegetable Farm

Vegetables, first of all are parts of a plant that are consumed by both humans and animals as food. Out of the many vegetables, Cabbage is my favorite vegetable ever, it is known for its dense leave heads and its high nutritional contents. It contains vitamin C and vitamin K and also seems to raise the levels of lutein and heart-protective antioxidants. One fun fact is the scientific name of my favorite vegetable which is Brassica oleracea var. capitata.

Another term given to vegetable farming is Olericulture. Vegetable farming is basically the growing of vegetables for human and animal consumption. In clearly stating my favorite vegetable earlier, it is obvious the choice of my favorite vegetable farm that will be a cabbage farm.

How to cultivate a Cabbage Farm

Source
Cabbage is a cool weathered crop meaning it grows well in spring where it can get enough water and proper ingredients to grow well. But now irrigation farming has made it possible to grow cabbage by creating the cool weather needed by the vegetable to grow. I will now enlighten you all on how cabbage is cultivated.

1. Finding where to cultivate: Cabbage are vegetables that are rich in nutrients they have drained from the soil, so this means that to cultivate cabbage the location should be rich in nutrients the plant can drain from if not the crop might not grow well. So in cases where the land lacks enough nutrients then you have to prepare the land in advance by applying composts, fertilizers, or other forms of adding nutrients to the soil. The PH of the soil also has to be between 6.5 to 6.8 where the vegetable grows well.

2. Planting at the correct time: As I said, cabbage grows in places with long cool weather with a temperature of 7 - 24 degrees celsius. Above that and the plant will crumble and die out. Before planting the crops you have to sow them indoors for about 4 to 6 weeks and when they grow about 2 to 4 inches, you now sow them outdoors to grow. They turn to be harvestable with a maximum of 180days.

3. Spacing of cabbage: The spacing of the plants is important to enhance their time of maturity and the wider the spacing the bigger the cabbage heads. we space cabbage when we are sowing the crops outdoors, you now create the space between all the plants as wide as you like for early maturity.

4. Maintaining the farm: After planting the vegetables outside, you now have to manage them to grow maturely and well. That involves watering the plants and checking for the matured heads because the heads can over mature till the split if they keep absorbing the nutrients after they are matured. The addition of important missing nutrients to the crops when noticed will improve the output results.

5. Pest control Pests and diseases are the major problems of every crop vegetable ever to be planted and as a cabbage farmer you need to talk this threat seriously because cabbages are fragile and with the smallest infection could spoil the whole vegetable crop. So you might result in using pesticides to control the infection rate. According to some folk law, says that if you spread the leaves over the cabbage it prevents it from bugs.

Cultural practices that can improve cabbage Farming

Cultural practices are the set of activities that are carried out at low cost with the aim of enabling the environment for plant growth. These activities are sometimes done before or after planting. They are used to replenish the soil nutrients lost and also control pests. Some of the cultural practices that could improve cabbage farming are;

1. Fallowing: In cultivating cabbage, the nutrients in the soils are the most important part of cultivating cabbage and as we have established already that cabbage is well known for it nutrient- draining. ,So with fallowing this is when part of a land is left unplanted over a period time to gain nutrients while the other part is used for harvesting and then switching the followed land after the previous land has began to lose or has lost its nutrients, leaving it to fallow an gain its lost nutrient back.

2. Destruction of infected crops: Cabbage is a fragile crop with the tendency to get infected rapidly once one of the heads get infected it can escalate quickly if not handled but with this use of this practice you will be able to avoid mass infection by just destroying the infected crops to save the others. This is one of the most effective practices you can use to improve cabbage farming.

3. Use of healthy seeds The type of seed you decide to use to cultivate could either be good or bad so you have to verify before using them. This practice saves you from a huge loss and emotional stress because if you use bad crops you will not get the output you want and all your effort will go to waste, but with this practice, you could get your deserved outputs.

In conclusion, I would like to once again commend this humble community @steemfarm-market for this contest and I must say, I really enjoyed it.
Good luck to my college contestants.

Thank you.