Local cabbage lands youth $1,000 prize

By TIM HORAN

City/County Editor

There was a time when the term �cabbage� referred to folding money.

Cabbage leaves range in color from dark green to light green to pale green just like the American dollar bill, sometimes referred to as a �greenback.�

One Abilene fourth grader turned her cabbage into greenbacks last summer: 1,000 of them.

Through a program sponsored by Bonnie Plants, Autumn Fitzgeralds raised a cabbage, entered it into the Bonnie Plants Cabbage Program and won a $1,000 scholarship.

According to Abilene McKinley Principal Tom Schwartz, the Bonnie Plants truck shows up sometime in March. All third graders can take about a two-inch sprig home to plant.

And that�s what Fitzgeralds did.

�Everyone in the third grade got an opportunity to grow one,� Fitzgeralds said. �I just took that opportunity.�

Fitzgeralds and her stepdad, Luke Geske, grow a garden together. That garden contains potatoes, radishes, tomatoes, onions and other varieties of vegetables and last summer one lone cabbage plant.

McKinley Principal Tom Schwartz said a truck shows up on an undisclosed day in March with the young plants. Schwartz said the program is free and optional and not every third grader takes a plant home.

Fitzgeralds planted hers in the garden on Flag Road. She is the daughter of Troy Fitzgeralds and Angela Geske.

�The tomatoes were big this year,� she said, adding that she used fertilizer to help the cabbage along.

The key was keeping varmints away.

�To keep the deer and rabbits or anything else that came, we had to build this little thing around it,� she said. �We had some wooden gates and other things.�

�We have chickens and they like the tomatoes,� Geske said. �We have coyotes but I don�t think they bother the garden.�

As part of the contest, they took a picture and entered the contest.

�By Sept. 7 we had to have it sent in to my teacher (Jamie Linenberger),� Fitzgeralds said.

After the contest the plant became a meal.

�I didn�t like it,� Fitzgeralds said.

They took the plant to the grocery store to weigh it first because the contest wanted to know that information. It weighed 10.1

pounds.

�We cut it up and it stunk up the whole house,� Fitzgeralds said. She said she gave part of the cabbage to each of her grandparents.

She said they made bierrocks with the remaining cabbage.

The humongous cabbage was selected by the Kansas Department of Agriculture. Autumn will receive a $1,000 saving bond towards education from Bonnie Plants which will be awarded at Garfield Elementary where she now goes to school. A winner is selected from all 48 states.

Bonnie Plants said 5,671 kids participated from Kansas.

This year, more than 1.5 million third graders in 48 states have gotten hands-on gardening experience, growing colossal cabbages with high hopes to win �best in state� and receive a $1,000 scholarship towards education from Bonnie Plants�, according to a company spokesperson. Each year Bonnie Plants, the largest producer of vegetable and herb plants in North America with 72 stations across the country, trucks free O.S. Cross, or �oversized,� cabbage plants to third grade classrooms whose teachers have signed up for the program online at www.bonnieplants.com. If nurtured and cared for, kids can grow green, giant cabbages, some tipping the scales at 40 pounds.

�The Bonnie Plants Cabbage Program is a wonderful way to engage children�s interest in agriculture, while teaching them not only the basics of gardening, but the importance of our food systems and growing our own�, said Stan Cope, president of Bonnie Plants.

A national plant wholesaler based in Alabama, Bonnie Plants supplies retail stores all over the United States.

Bonnie Plants began in 1918 in the backyard of Bonnie and Livingston Paulk and has grown to include 70+ greenhouse locations around the country.