Ilene,

TOMATOES:

If I lived in your part of the state, I believe I would spray the plants with Daconil. I like to do things the organic way, but there is no good organic solution to EB. Sometimes you have to choose to use a chemical or there is little to no harvest at all. Heck, some years I wish I had started Daconil at transplant time. By the time you see EB, by the way, it is too late to start Daconil and expect good results. Daconil is most effective at keeping EB away, but once EB arrives, Daconil does not "kill" it although it might slow its spread.

My choice not to use Daconil explains why I replant for fall tomatoes--because the EB damages the spring-planted ones so severely in late June through late July that it is easier to start over with fresh plants for a fall harvest. Usually, but not always, my cherry tomato plants and a few others outgrow the EB, but a lot of the others do not.

CABBAGE:

Well, my personal solution would be that you convince your spouse you need a tornado shelter. (Then (hee hee) you could use it as a root cellar. However, if that is not practical, here's a few other suggestions.

1. For best keeping, plant a cabbage that is a long keeper. Harvest while slightly undersized (slightly larger than a softball). For spring-planted cabbage, cut off the head off the stump of the plant with a sharp knife and leave the roots/stump in the ground. You ought to get a new, small head on the stump, or with some cabbages, you get multiple sprouts that look like brussels sprouts. You can harvest and eat them like brussels sprouts.

2. For fall-planted cabbage, you can leave it in the garden bed all fall and most of winter if you heavily mulch it....and if mice, voles, rats and squirrels don't find it and eat it. You can build an above ground "storage pit" using 6 or 8 bales of hay placed around a row of several cabbages, and the put a piece of plywood over the tops of the bales and then lay a couple of bags of leaves on top of the plywood as insulation.

You also can store cabbage heads for 3-6 months in a fridge.

Sometimes you can store cabbage in an unheated garage or shed or an unheated screened-in porch or breezeway. The results are variable, though, and this works best if you have pretty good humidity and a stable, cold winter.....not one like this year with multiple days where the temps have gone pretty high.

Sometimes you can store cabbage in an unheated attic or crawl space under a house. This works best if you can hang the cabbage (maybe using cheesecloth or something similar) so it has air all around it. Success will vary, and mice or other rodents might get to it.

In the absence of a cellar, basement, root cellar or tornado shelter, you can store in a pit. See the linked publication for a good description of how to build one.

You can even store in a trench dug in your garden. I think that is described in the linked publication too.

You can make sauerkraut.

You can slice it, blanch it, and freeze it. Of course, after that, it is only good for cooking.

You can preserve cabbage by canning it in chow chow relish, traditional corn relish, Dixie relish, Piccallili relish, Red Root Relish (if it is red cabbage),Sweet and Sour Pepper Relish or Spiced Red Cabbage. I am sure there are many other ways to can it as well.

Finally, if you have a dehydrator you can dry it and use it in cooking. To dry it, split the cabbage and cut out the bitter core. Slice up the rest and spread it on drying trays. Dry it at a fairly low temperature--about 120 or so--because higher temps will burn it up. Dry it until the pieces feel brittle. Then, store it in dried shreds or grind it up into a powder and add it to soups, stews or salads.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Long-Term Home Garden Vegetable Storage