Forget James and the Giant Peach.
This is the story of Allie and the Colossal Cabbage.
Allie Martin, a 9-year-old Magnet Cove Elementary School pupil in Malvern, recently was announced as the Arkansas winner of the National Bonnie Plants Cabbage Program with her 21-pound (!) cabbage.
Now, Alabama-based Bonnie Plants has sponsored this program nationwide, open to third-graders, since 2002. (It was first introduced on a smaller scale in 1996.) And there's an Arkansas winner every year. And it's sort of a "random" winner at that -- more on the confusing process in a minute.
So we usually just "leaf" it alone.
But when I saw the "slawsome" picture of the adorable real-life cabbage patch kid and her produce (see page 6E), I needed to know more about the girl and hear her VeggieTales.
This year I had to bite.
To explain the cabbage contest procedures, first "lettuce" hear from Bonnie representative Joan Casanova:
"Third-grade teachers sign up online, and they register their class for cabbages," she says. "Bonnie delivers that number of cabbage plants to the schools. ... This particular variety is a very hardy variety, and it can grow upwards of 40 pounds. Kids take the cabbages home to grow. ... Parents take a cellphone image of the child with the harvested cabbage and submit it to the teacher. The teacher looks at all the images. ... and picks the largest cabbage submitted. Bonnie Plants gets ... one picture per class statewide. Then they call the Commissioner of Agriculture in that state and ask for a random number, and that corresponding picture wins.
"So it becomes a random drawing of best in class."
As for why, she explains: "A lot of times, the cabbages are so similar so you can't say which is better, so this makes it easier." After all, they're inspecting a lot of plants. This year, 24,217 Arkansas students participated; more than 1 million participated nationally.
Allie's mother Mollie wasn't new to this project: "We had a third-grader before with her older sister; it was not a successful cabbage. And so we feel somewhat guilty because Allie's cabbage just really took off. But she really took care of it.
"She tended to it every day. She would go check on it and water it. And kids are still imaginative at that point. So she would go talk to it, and if it stormed, she would have to go check on it as soon as the storm passed, make sure it was OK and brush the dirt off the leaves.
"She loved this cabbage."
This cabbage. Not the cruciferous vegetable in general.
"She doesn't eat cabbage," Mollie says about Allie, now in fourth grade. "We don't eat cabbage. We just grew it because it was a school project and she took an interest in it. And when it was time to harvest, we pulled it up, we weighed it and we measured it and all that stuff, we took it back outside and set it on the porch. And she said, 'Mom what are we going to do with this cabbage?' And I said, 'What do you want to do?' She said, 'Well, you put it on the porch.' I said, 'You can't keep it forever.' And so she was really sad that she couldn't keep her cabbage forever.
"She took great pride in it."
All 52 inches in diameter of it. It was so unwieldy they transported it around with a wagon.
Eventually, Mollie says, they disposed of it. They didn't make stuffed cabbage, cabbage soup or sauerkraut. They never tasted it all, and for good reason.
"My dog actually peed on it," Mollie, confesses in a lowered voice, causing me to almost (cabbage) roll on the floor laughing. "And so, I wasn't really sure how you clean that -- yeah you can rinse it off, but in your mind you know that your dog still hiked its leg on it.
"Probably don't put that in there."
Sorry, Mollie. I just couldn't put the kibosh on that part of the cabbage chronicles.
Allie won $1,000, which she could have as cash or a savings bond. The new gardener went right for the green stuff. Says Mollie, "She has to save part of it, and then we're going to let her spend some of it." She might even spend it on gardening.
Mollie says after this experience, Allie "thinks she can grow giant produce and become wealthy because she thinks she can get $1,000" off each vegetable.
After all, for Allie, money does grow on plants.
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What's in a Dame is a weekly report from the woman 'hood.
Style on 11/13/2018