Southern Ontario farm baffled by case of mystery cabbages

ELORA – Time to call in Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys because there’s a mystery afoot at a farm near Elora that's been affectionately dubbed “the case of the mystery cabbages.”

The owners of Wilowhead Family Farm on Wellington Road 7, just north of Salem in the Guelph area, discovered a dump truck load of cabbages dropped off in their barnyard. 

Wilowhead Family Farm is mainly focused on cash crops and specialty cut flowers so owner Elizabeth Shoemaker said a pile of cabbages was the “last thing you expect to go and find in your yard in the morning.”

“One of our neighbours was picking up something from our yard yesterday morning and we went out and there were cabbages everywhere,” said Shoemaker, who owns the farm along with her parents and husband. 

“We checked our security cameras and then we saw the waste management truck come in on Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. and then they dropped it off and we had no clue.”

The waste management company is also puzzled by this, according to Shoemaker, and they are working with their operations department to figure out where the cabbages came from and why it was delivered there. 

“They just can’t figure out where the cabbages came from and it was their trucks,” Shoemaker said. 

She has asked neighbours if they were expecting a shipment to use as feed because they are pig farmers but found they didn’t order it either. 

“Apparently pigs don’t eat cabbages but cows do,” Shoemaker said. “We went to visit all of our neighbours and no one had ordered a load of cabbages. They’re all cut in half too, which is even more funny.”

Shoemaker has a sense of humour about the whole situation, laughing throughout the whole interview, and the farm is holding onto the cabbages in case they figure out where they were supposed to go. 

“If someone still wants their cabbages, they’re welcome to have them but I think we’re probably just going to end up composting them,” Shoemaker said. “We’ll just dump them into the manure pile and wait for the smell.”

If you have any information on the mystery cabbages, Shoemaker said you can reach out to the farm via email at [email protected].