As It Happens

Massive 12-kilo red cabbage wins top prize at Fall Fair -- and alerts As It Happens archivists to start digging

Usually, the tractor pulls and demolition derbies get all the attention at Orangeville, Ontario's Fall Fair. But this year, it was all about cabbage. One really, really big cabbage. Over the weekend, hobby gardener Joe Dumond's monster 12-kilo red cabbage won a top prize at the fair's field crop competition....

Usually, the tractor pulls and demolition derbies get all the attention at Orangeville, Ontario's Fall Fair. But this year, it was all about cabbage. One really, really big cabbage. Over the weekend, hobby gardener Joe Dumond's monster 12-kilo red cabbage won a top prize at the fair's field crop competition.

"I'm getting a lot of fame for this little cabbage here in Orangeville," Dumond tells As It Happens host Carol Off. "I watched everybody come into the fairground and first thing they stopped and looked at was this great big purple cabbage."

Dumond says he wasn't initially aiming for a world record: "I was just growing a cabbage so we could have something to eat in the fall.

"The Guinness World Record is 42 pounds and that was set in 1925, [and] the Alaska State Fair record for a red cabbage was 43 pounds, so compared to those I'm still off by a little bit."

He planted the cabbage late in the growing season, and around the beginning of August, it began to bloom bigger than its neighbours in his garden.

A closer look at the prize-winning red cabbage (Photo courtesy of Joe Dumond)

"Once I started to see that this cabbage was starting to take off, I thought, well, let's try this 'compost tea' I've been reading about," he says. "You take grain water, you put in a sack of cow manure -- and I also used sheep manure that I had -- and... leaf mulch. I put the three of them in this sack, [and] add some molasses so that the bacteria that comes out of it will have something to eat. Then a little bit of fish emulsion."

He made a brew of this "compost tea" and poured it on the cabbage.

"The smell stuck in my nose for a day or two," he says. "It was that bad."

Dumond is already thinking about next year's crop and trying to beat the world record. Until then, he's looking for cabbage recipes.

"We're trying to figure out how much cabbage we can stand eating for the next while," he says with a laugh.

And of course, we couldn't possibly end our cabbage coverage without leafing back to a celebrated interview from 1976. That's when former host Barbara Frum spoke with a British farmer who grew the world's largest cabbage. Many of you will recall that the farmer had just returned home from the pub -- before getting on the phone. To add to Barbara's frustration, he turned out to be more than a little hard of hearing. Here's just a part of their classic conversation, from our archives.