The secret to growing a 14.7kg cabbage? Serenade your sprouts daily — that is, according to a group of green-fingered amateurs from Kaohsiung First Community University.
The giant vegetable — 10 times the size of an average cabbage — was grown by a group of 52 novice farmers at the community college who had spent the past year learning from scratch how to grow vegetables.
At a fundraiser on Saturday where the group displayed and sold the fruits of their labors for charity, members of the club said that singing and playing music to their patch of tomatoes, pumpkins, green peppers and cabbages had been key to the bountiful harvest.
Photo: CNA
Club head Yu Shu-yen (游淑燕) told reporters that each member of the club had been assigned a plot of land measuring 20 ping (66m2) to farm after completing 18 lessons on soil, water control, plant diseases and pests, plant selection, and ways to grow vegetables and fruits.
Club members cultivated their crops without using pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
Yu said they played music and sang their favorite songs to the vegetables every day to help them “grow up healthily.”
Speaking of the 14.7kg cabbage that stole the show at Saturday’s event, Yu said that certain species of cabbage normally take four to five months to mature, but this one had been harvested only four months after it was planted.
The cabbage could have grown bigger if it had not been harvested for the charity event, with Yu attributing the size of the vegetable to the “friendly farmland” on which it grew.
“It is the reward for the club’s long-term dedication to the promotion of non-toxic agriculture,” Yu said, adding that the approach protected plants from pollution.
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