Hey . . . d'you wanna cabbage?

I was just walking the dogs back from the school amble a couple of days ago and this guy popped out from behind a tall gate and said the above (in French). I wondered if 'chou' was also used as a local word for indulging in something deviant as he was looking a bit shifty. Then I realised he was one of our neigbours from over the train tracks. I've only spoken to him a couple of times, not because either of us are unfriendly, but we just don't cross paths very often.

I followed him into the garden and he pointed to a row of magnificent cabbages growing in dark rich loamy soil.
I was immediately wildly envious as our garden's crappy vine soil won't grow such things. Put in a baby cabbage plant and it sits there, growing in a sort of arrested state, perhaps a nano-millimetre every month, not actually dying off, just not really getting any bigger. Eventually, plucked from the crusty soil about a year later having ingested a bath-worths of water, off to the kitchen.
Nice folk invited round for dinner say things like: "Mmm, so fresh, such a condensed cabbage taste, you can always tell when something's organic by the number of slug holes in it." - In this case more hole than vegetable.
Anyway, Monsieur vanished to a shed, came back with a large knife and proceeded to remove one of the cabbages (pictured here with a key to show its monster proportions). He put it in a bin liner and presented it to me: "Voila, madame."
       "Merci bien, Monsieur!"
       "It is my pleasure, madame . . . we never eat cabbage."
What?You grow these things, well, just toss a few seeds about - they grow into Women's institute vegetable show specimens, without a single word of encouragement from you . . . and you don't eat them! Merde alors! "Vraiment . . . really? How strange, monsieur," Grrrr.
He then told me many interesting stories of the various roads in that part of town: who's donkey lived where in 1933; what Madame Dupont sold in her shop on the corner, and how there used to be a fabulously beautiful stone arch and ramparts at the end of the road before the hideous fire station was constructed in the 1980s. It was all really fascinating. I would like to go back and write this valuable history down. He had been born in the house behind us; his parents and grandparents had lived there and had no doubt always grown magnificent cabbages, which in another era they certainly would have eaten.
I walked back clutching the bag and shouting at the dogs as they wandered off in search of unspeakable things to consume.
How wonderful, I thought, (as we passed our own sorry looking, weed-strewn veg patch), it would be to look back in time at that garden when his grandparents were using it as their main food source, chickens, pigs, fruit . . . and cabbages.