Vegetable · Brassicaceae
When to plant red cabbages
Slower than a green cabbage by two or three weeks and worth the wait, because red cabbage stores longer than almost anything else you can lift in autumn.
Start seed indoors
8 weeks before
Counted from your last spring frost.
Plant out
3 weeks before
Counted from your last spring frost.
Days to maturity
90-120
From planting out to a first picking.
Those weeks become real dates once you name a place.
Timing, in frost-relative terms
Seed packets rarely give calendar dates, because a date that suits one latitude is wrong at another. They give offsets from the last spring frost instead, and those offsets are what make red cabbages plantable anywhere.
- Start seed indoors 8 weeks before the last frost.
- Plant out 3 weeks before the last frost.
- Expect 90–120 days to maturity, counted from planting out.
Getting the timing right
Start indoors about eight weeks before the last frost and plant out three weeks before it. The colour deepens in cool weather, so an autumn crop is better than a summer one.
Frost tolerance
Hardy to roughly -8C. Heads left standing take frost without splitting, which is the usual reason to leave them out rather than lift them early.
Classified as hardy, with damage expected below -8°C (17.6°F)17.6°F (-8°C).