I agree, give your cabbage time.

Cabbage forms the big leaves first and then, eventually, the head begins to form in the middle. Those big leaves you see now are the photosynthesis factory that will make your cabbage heads form. Be patient. Cabbage normally does not finish up nearly as early as broccoli, for example, and while I usually am harvesting broccoli in May (the broccoli is early this year), sometimes the cabbage isn't ready until June and it often holds well in the garden even until July. It varies a lot from year to year, depending on the weather and the DTM of the varieties you've planted, but I don't think I've ever had cabbage be ready to harvest this early, and I'm a lot further south than you are and generally our harvest is a couple of weeks earlier down here. I planted cabbage in mid-February and I planted relatively early varieties and I bet mine is still at least a month away, if not more, from being ready for harvest.

It is tempting to pull some leaves for my burger wrap mmmmmm

I am looking at those big leaves and going....once the heads do come in, it would be a shame to waste them

My cauliflower is not growing any white heads either yet. I am waiting..but gosh, warm season stuff is going in now. :)

This was in June

Kim, It's your cabbage. If you want to pull some leaves to use, you can do it, you know, and no garden police are going to come give you a citation for harvesting early or anything. Your garden. Your rules. I harvest plant parts all the time long before the plant actually matures, including harvesting onions and using them at any size, and harvesting young leaves of all leaf crops. Why not? If you can eat from your garden a month or two earlier, why not do it?

Ezzirah, Sometimes you can cut off your cabbage heads, and then cut an X in the stalk that is left in the ground. Cut down maybe a quarter to half inch. By doing that, you separate the remaining main stalk into 4 separate sections, still attached to the main stalk. Guess what happens? The plant forms 4 small heads that you can harvest in a few weeks. They won't get as big as your first head from that plant, but they'll be tender and tasty, and a way to get more production from each plant.

I harvested big broccoli heads (up to 9.5" across) yesterday and then today I harvested the cauliflower heads. When I looked down inside the cauliflower leaves, I actually found several full-sized heads (guess they grew by leaps and bounds during the rain we've been having) and several almost full-sized ones. Tomorrow I imagine I'll harvest at least half the remaining spinach crop that's left in the ground. The plants are starting to shoot up and get that uncomfortably tall look that tells me they are about to bolt. I've been harvesting and using spinach all along, but I guess I need to pick up the pace before the increasing day length and heat get it.

Being the tomato- and pepper- loving gardener that I am, I voted against saving the brassica plants for side shoots, yanked them out this morning, hauled them to the compost pile in the wheelbarrow and planted a row of tomato plants in their place. This afternoon I'll finish filling that space with a row of pepper plants alongside the tomato plants.

My cabbage plants looked good last night and are forming heads, but aren't close to being full-sized yet. The purple cabbage with the shortest DTM has heads about half-sized.

I came inside from the garden to eat a late lunch and have been watching the news about musical artist Prince's death at age 57. How sad. Maybe I'll harvest a young purple cabbage and cook it and then we'll eat it with dinner tonight in memory of Prince. (Hey, we gardeners pay tribute in our own unique ways.)

Dawn

If I had several I'd bee stealing one and making sum cabbage rolls!! hehe

I am patiently waiting ......

OK maybe just one leaf for my dinner.

Little man and I regularly break the rules and eat a lot of carrots before their time.

We eat the leaves before the head forms. Still tastes like cabbage! Just don't pick to many leaves off one plant. Oh and we eat carrot tops to before the carrots are ready.

I noticed today my broccoli leaves are massive. Been good weather for the cool veggies so far.

My cabbage looks OK but hasn't even started to head up. I'm not eating much of anything from my garden yet. I have spinach/mustard that is already going to seed, but the spinach is just now getting to be the right eating size. I didn't even have asparagus this year since I had to start a new bed. Of course, I am always behind most of you, but will catch up in a few weeks.

This has been the most perfect weather for cool season crops that we have had in ages and ages. Why can't we have this sort of weather every spring?

We were very warm very early, so the small cool-season crops grew quickly once planted. They were so short that the crazy wind didn't bother them and now that they are huge, the crazy wind is over. It rained enough early in their lives, but not too much. We didn't have the extreme late cold that often makes cool-season plants in the brassica family eventually buttonhead. When the cool weather returned and chased away the windy weather and the extremely warm weather, the cool-season plants were already a nice size and were very healthy. Then it stayed cool and rainy for quite a while and they put on massive growth during that time. So far, no brassica plant pests have shown up---no cabbage loopers, no imported cabbage worms, no harlequin bugs. Not even any aphids. What hail we have had here wasn't large enough to hurt the plants.

The only cool-season plants in my garden that stalled due to too much early heat are the Sugar Snap Peas. For some reason, they did not enjoy having high temperatures in the upper 80s while they were still very small and they just sat there and pouted. They also didn't care for all the hot and windy days. After the big cool-down and the prolonged cloudy, cool spell, they are doing really well, but.....

Because the sugar snap peas stalled, and because I planted bush beans extremely early, the bush beans and the sugar snap peas are going to be producing their first harvest at almost the same exact time. That is fairly rare here. Usually we have been eating snap peas for a while before the first bean harvest finally happens. I think my bush beans were early last year too, but likely not as early as the snap peas.

It was 79 degrees here yesterday and we have highs in the 80s looming in the forecast during the next few days, generally before next week's severe weather arrives. The spinach just doesn't like temperatures in the 80s so I'll likely harvest at least half of it today to beat the heat, and the other half either tomorrow or Sunday. There's a limit to how many spinach leaves I want to triple wash and spin dry on any given day, and I planted a lot of spinach. The plants are now about full sized, and the spinach we've been harvesting for weeks and weeks has been baby spinach. Now we have adult-sized spinach, but the heat it going to get it quickly if I don't havest before that happens.

The earliest lettuce plants, from which we have been harvesting using the cut-and-come-again method, are bolting too. The onion plants are huge and the short-day varieties I grow are starting to bulb up. They are not necessarily early, but they are right on time. Usually the short day onions are ready for harvest from mid- to late-May. The potato plants are very large and are blooming. The kale plants are likely going to bolt soon. They tried to bolt about a month ago, but I cut them back very hard, removing almost all their leaves and that put them back into a vegetative growth cycle, especially since the weather then turned cool and rainy. You can fool kale a little while, but you cannot fool it indefinitely.

I hope the weather is as kind to all the warm-season plants as it has been to the cool-season plants. Usually I am impatiently waiting for the cool-season stuff to hury up and finish up so I can harvest them and get them out of the way and plant the warm season plants that follow them. This year, they're doing so well that I haven't been worrying about how long it is taking them. And it has been nice not to have to cover up the cool-season plants as often as usual due to extreme late cold since there hasn't been much extreme late cold. It really has been a perfect cool season down here.