Few vegetables combine taste, nutritional value and sheer versatility like the humble cabbage, and these bulbous, leaft vegetables can be used in recipes from a wide variety of cuisines, from traditional English to modern Korean fusion. They can also be surprisingly easy to grow, and growing your own cabbages can be both a rewarding hobby and an excellent way to save money on your grocery bill.

However, while cabbages are relatively hardy vegetables, they do have rather specific nutritional requirements, and adding carefully chosen fertilisers to your cabbages is the best way to ensure your cabbages grow large and healthy. Keep the following guidelines in mind as you pick out and apply your cabbage fertilisers to ensure your cabbages grow to their maximum potential:

Choose a fertiliser with the right nutritional content

Almost all leafy green plants require three basic elements to germinate and grow properly; nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium (called 'potash' by some fertiliser manufacturers). All garden fertilisers, both synthetic and organic, contain significant quantities of these core elements, but each plant requires different amounts of each element, and choosing a fertiliser with the wrong nutritional balance can stunt their growth or even kill them off entirely.

Cabbages are notoriously greedy when it comes to soil nutrition, and for good reason. Nitrogen is essential for the formation of leaves and green growth in most plants, and since a cabbage is essentially a mass of densely-packed leaves, they require a large amount of nitrogen to grow properly. They do still require a significant amount of potassium and phosphorous, however, as these elements are required to ward off disease and grow strong, healthy roots.

You should therefore choose a fertiliser with about twice as much nitrogen content as potassium and phosphorous content. 10-5-5 or 16-8-8 fertilisers are generally ideal for growing most varieties of cabbage.

Apply fertilisers before planting

Cabbages have a relatively short growing season, and will start to sprout and grow rapidly as soon as their seeds are planted. During these early stages of development, adequate nutrition is vital, so you should add fertilisers to your soil before planting your seeds. Organic fertilisers are better than synthetic fertilisers for this task, as synthetic fertilisers tend to be leeched away more quickly by watering and wet weather, and may not stick around long enough for your seeds to benefit.

Fertiliser again once cabbage heads start to form

Once your cabbages have been growing for some time and the above-ground portion of the plant is forming a distinct head, you should fertilise your cabbages once again. Synthetic liquid fertilisers are ideal for this stage of fertilisation, as at this stage of growth the cabbage will abosrb nutrition rapidly and waste due to leeching will be minimal. As such, keeping both organic and synthetic fertilisers on hand for your cabbages is generally advieseable.