I leave mine whole to store it Bon. It keeps for weeks in a good refrigerator, not too warm or too cold. I use mine regularly instead of salad and I will chop enough for the week and sprinkle lemon juice on it. And of course there's fermenting which I want to I do but I'm afraid the Temps in the camper aren't consistent enough.

I grow about two dozen heads each spring, both red and green, and start harvesting the first ones when the heads are about half their mature size (anytime after the young heads feel fairly firm is fine for early harvesting) so we can eat them fresh, either cooked in various ways, as cole slaw or in mixed green salads. That way we are eating the cabbage all along, instead of harvesting two dozen heads at once. I do usually grow at least 2 varieties with different DTMs and sometimes 3, 4 or 5, so the harvest can be spread over a very long period of time.

We probably eat about half of the cabbage fresh and I turn the rest of it into either sauerkraut (fermented, and it is so hard to make....cabbage + salt, and sometimes a salt-water brine if the cabbage doesn't make enough of its own liquid when you stomp it) or freezer slaw. This spring I've been on a big sauerkraut kick since the weather has been mild enough for a long time and this allows the AC to keep the kitchen cool enough for proper fermenting to occur. Our last two batches of sauerkraut, one of which is regular kraut and the other one is a spicier kraut, are fermenting now and will be ready in roughly 3 weeks. We also have two batches of cucumber pickles fermenting, one a sweet pickle and the other a spicy dill, so everything in our kitchen seems to be in some stage of fermentation.

We have only three large heads of cabbage left now, reserved for fresh eating, and we'll eat them at the rate of about one head every week or two, so we'll be out of fresh cabbage by July. That's okay because we try to eat seasonally from whatever is in the garden at the time, so by July our taste buds will be enjoying other flavors of other foods, and we'll still have sauerkraut if we get a hankering for cabbage.

We keep an extra fridge in the garage for cold storage of extra drinks (water, Gatorade, and beer for Tim) and garden produce. Sometimes the cold drinks are buried under lumpy, bumpy bags filled with produce either (a) serving its time in cold storage until we can eat it, or (b) merely awaiting processing via canning, dehydrating, freezing or fermenting. Cabbage and carrots both will stay in good shape in there for many weeks, sometimes for months. You have to be very careful when opening up a fridge at our house in the summer as both the kitchen fridge and the garage fridge are prone to drop produce-filled bags on your toes at times. I try to process anything that is being preserved as quickly as possible, but some days it all is ready for harvest at once and I get behind. As our garden got bigger and bigger every year for the first decade (or longer) after we moved here, my family just had to get used to working their way around piles of produce filling every flat surface and the fridge too, and the pantry as well (onions and taters) during peak harvest periods.

You also can preserve cabbage by canning it in some recipes, but I don't can a lot of it, other than canning the sauerkraut after the fermentation is complete. A firefighter who used to work at Chris' station (now he is at a different station, so I don't get to hear regular tales of his cooking triumphs as he also is a trained chef) likes to slice cabbage and cook it in the oven drizzled with olive oil and spices. I do something similar, but just stir fry it in a pan on top of the stove with olive oil and spices. Cabbage is very versatile and you can find many ways to enjoy it.

Dawn

I've made a few jars of sauerkraut already, with more coming. I've also experimented with a couple batches of kimchi, which is just sauerkraut with an Asian twist. In my latest batch I mixed in cabbage, shredded carrots, onions and garlic, all from the garden. Red pepper flakes give it heat. Of course, I absolutely love cole slaw. I agree that cabbage will hold in the fridge for a long time. It's also holding pretty good in the garden right now. I've harvested about half my small crop in stages over the last two weeks and will pick the rest as the mood strikes over the next two or three.

Kimchi in a bottle, with a plastic bag full of salt water keeping the veggies in the brine:

Bon, we enjoy fried cabbage. I just chop it up a little more coarsely than coleslaw and cook it in a tablespoon or so of oil/grease. I usually cover it with a glass lid to "wilt" it. It then shrinks down and cooks more evenly.