'Botran' Black-Rot Resistant Cabbage Variety
We're here to talk about 'Botran' cabbage today and specifically we want to discuss 'Botran' because it has intermediate resistance to black rot which is a bacterial disease caused by a bacteria called Xanthomonas.
It can be a really devastating disease if you have that in your soil. The disease will start with black lesions in the leaves of cabbage and other brassicas and eventually they'll turn yellow and brown and it can destroy a whole crop. It tends to occur in areas where brassicas are not rotated as much as they should be. Sometimes it occurs in the Pacific Northwest, the Southeast, but it can occur anywhere.
There are a couple of things you can do to avoid black rot in your brassica crop. Black rot can get into a crop in a couple of different ways. One, it can be seed-borne. So you want to make sure you always purchase seeds that have been tested negative for black rot. At Johnny's, we test seeds for cabbage, cauliflower, kale, and all of our other brassica crops. We test them negative before we offer them.
The other way a crop can get black rot is from it being in the soil. If there's an infected crop and it's turned into the soil, the black rot organism can last for several years. So we recommend only planting a brassica crop in a particular field once every four years. That's kind of a background on black rot and how to avoid it.
The other way to avoid black rot is resistance. If you have it in your soil and you know you do, resistance is a really good option. Resistance for black rot is intermediate. There's no real high resistance yet. There are different strains, so the same resistant variety may perform differently in different areas due to strain or to disease pressure.
All that being equal, 'Botran', if you have black rot in your soil, is a good choice. It comes in around 90 days. It's a fresh market variety, so it's on the late side. Pretty good eating quality. You can cook it, you can make kraut—basically anything you would do with a cabbage.
We have three different heads of 'Botran' right here. We have a small one here, which is around 3 pounds. This was planted in a trial that was 8 to 9 inches. Then these bigger heads here, this one's about 6 pounds, and this is probably 7 or 8. These were planted 18 inches apart. You could even get larger heads by planting 24 inches apart.
That's a background on a little discussion, and now we're going to cut the heads open so you can see the internal quality. I'll choose the middle head here. Here you have the internal appearance of 'Botran'. You can see it's got a nice short core, which means that you have plenty of usable leaves and less waste. And you can also see it's really tightly packed, and these are really heavy heads. So that's a nice example of 'Botran' cabbage.
In summary, if you have issues with black rot in your home garden or in your commercial field, we recommend that you trial 'Botran' and see how it works in your system.