A cabbage named Clyde was set to vie for Alaska State Fair glory. Then, he went missing.

PALMER — K Michael Ward arrived at the Alaska State Fair last week and headed for the animal barn, ready for some detective work.

Her destination: a sawdust-covered pen, where a herd of aspiring prize-winning cabbages had been assembled atop tarps just before the fair’s annual weigh-off.

The semi-retired human resources consultant was on the hunt for her own resplendent vegetable. Just 24 hours before, Ward’s cabbage, which she’d spent months raising, had gone missing — and she was on guard against funny business from the other contestants.

“That would be one reason to steal it,” Ward said. “Theirs got really lousy, and they needed one to replace it.”

The fair’s cabbage contest – with a $1,000 prize for the heaviest entrant – always supplies a bumper crop of stories. This year’s included an 8-year-old grower on the podium and a repeat winner who sucked rot-inducing slugs off his cabbage with a vacuum cleaner.

[From the Mat-Su Sentinel: 'Post Office' delivers in Alaska State Fair cabbage weigh-off]

Ward’s tale, however, may be unique: a still-unsolved heist from an Anchorage community garden on the eve of the competition.

Her search at the fair did not turn up any lookalikes, and the perpetrator remains at large. Perhaps even two perpetrators, as Ward suspects such muscle was needed to extricate, from a moose-resistant cage, a cabbage she estimated at 55 pounds.

“It was just startling that somebody would actually take my cabbage,” Ward said in an interview. “When they get that big, they don’t taste very good.”

Ward was set to be a first-time weigh-off contestant, and she said her cabbage likely wouldn’t have been a podium contender — which, in last week’s competition, would have required an 80-pounder.

Ward was inspired to enter after taking a master gardener course. As Anchorage began melting out this year, Ward started her cabbage from seed — a hybrid called an 0-S, known for its "enormous flat-topped, exhibition-sized heads that often attain 70 pounds or more when grown under Alaska's long summer days," according to Denali Seed Co.

“This puppy was in my kitchen, growing, starting in March,” Ward said.

When it was warm enough, Ward transplanted the cabbage into her Midtown Anchorage community garden, where she’d prepared the plot with layers of horse manure and compost. She planted marigolds around the edges to ward off bugs, watered diligently and renounced fertilizer and pesticides. It grew up into a solid green globe that, for no particular reason, she named Clyde. 

“Everybody said it’s got to go to the fair,” Ward said.

“It was her prize thing,” said Michael Meade, a fellow community gardener. “She’s there every day.”

Ward has nothing but praise for her community garden, which she describes as a “magical place.” It has a depot where people can trade in old pots and collect manure, compost and wood chips. Gardeners donate some of their harvest to “free farm stand” events, where hungry people can pick up fresh produce.

But the community garden’s location — near the intersection of two busy Midtown streets, Benson Boulevard and C Street — does apparently lend itself to periodic vegetable theft. 

Meade has had a couple of his own cabbages taken; Ward said she was realistic about the risks. Each day, as the weigh-off approached, Ward was grateful when she returned to the garden and found Clyde still in his place.

“I was so excited that it actually made it to the fair,” she said.

Except, it hadn’t.

The weigh-off was scheduled for a Friday. 

On her visit to her garden plot the preceding Wednesday evening, Ward had photographed the cabbage, its huge leaves outstretched toward the sun. 

Then, 24 hours later, she returned. “And there was nothing,” she said.

“Your heart’s in your stomach — it’s like, ‘Oh.’”

“And then a few four-letter words you cannot print,” she said.

The theft was confounding to Ward given the abundance of smaller, more portable cabbages present at the garden. But she didn’t file a police report.

“This was just a very unfortunate incident,” she said.

She plans to try again next year. But she may hedge her bets by growing a second entry in a friend’s greenhouse.

“I’ll get one of them, at least, to the fair,” she said. A spokeswoman for the fair, Melissa Keefe, said: “We can’t wait to have her back.”

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