‘Cabbagegate’ vexing Layton residents after field of cabbage was left to rot
The neighbors are calling it “Cabbagegate.”
Personally, I prefer “Coleslawpocalypse,” “Slawmageddon” or even “Sauerkrautastrophe.”
Since last fall, residents of the Pheasant Place subdivision in west Layton have been doing battle with hordes of angry-smelling cabbages in a field off 500 South at about 1500 West. Among those leading that fight has been 34-year-old Mark Brough, who lives nearby with his wife and son.
“The farmer planted the cabbage last summer, but didn’t care for it after that,” Brough explains. “He never did come to harvest it, and the cabbage in the field was left to rot. It’s been rotting there all fall and winter.”
I do love a good coleslaw — whose main ingredient is cabbage — but I’m not personally acquainted with the smell of that particular vegetable when it starts to spoil. Another Pheasant Place neighbor, Stephanie Heiner, offers this vivid description on Facebook: “The smell can only be described as an animal that rolled in cooked broccoli, climbed into a heating unit, curled up next to a soiled diaper and bad chicken, died and is rotting there as the heat slowly rots it all.”
Brough says the smell was bad, even in the dead of winter.
“On inversion days, the air would get locked in and the smell was pretty bad,” he said.
Brough isn’t blaming the city; he says Layton’s code enforcement issued a 14-day courtesy notice of ordinance violation on the rotting cabbage, but nothing was happening.
“They’ve got to be getting 20 calls a day,” Brough said of the mayor’s office and the city’s code enforcement. “Our whole (LDS) ward has been affected — that’s maybe 250 families. I think people to the south are dealing with the smell, too, but in our neighborhood especially.”
That’s when Brough decided to take it to the next level. He dug up a few head of cabbage, put them in a bucket and carted them up to the March 2 Layton City Council meeting.
“I let them smell it,” he said. “They were all taken aback. I put it in front of the city attorney’s nose. He sat there smelling it, then slowly started backing away. It’s the only way I knew to show them what we’re dealing with.”
Brough says the rotting-cabbage smell is the big news in the neighborhood.
“I told the city council, ‘That’s all we talk about at church and in the neighborhood — this damn cabbage,’ ” Brough said. “The joke around the neighborhood is that it smells like kimchi.”
Things got worse before they got better. Last summer, the offending plot of ground was just one great big field of cabbage, according to Brough. In the fall, it was divided, and a home-builder began developing the eastern half of the cabbage patch.
“It took them a long time to get out there, but they finally plowed the west side,” Brough said. “But on the east property, the developer just scraped the ground and put the cabbage in a big pile.”
Recently, water from the rotting pile of cabbage worked its way into the subdivision, and the smell started coming up through residents’ floor drains.
This has been particularly hard on Brough’s wife, who’s experiencing the heightened sense of smell that often comes with pregnancy.
“She has a really good nose anyway, but since the pregnancy has come on, it’s been really bad,” Brough said. “I told the city council, ‘You’ve got to understand, I’m between a field of rotten cabbage and a pregnant wife.’ “
Brough says he feels like he’s living in a seance.
“There are soooo many candles burning around the house — scented candles,” he said. “It’s like we’re living in the pre-electricity days.”
Since the March 2 city council meeting, Brough says, residents have been getting some satisfaction — if not olfactory relief — on this issue. The city has put in a stop-work order on the developer until the cabbage problem is dealt with. And Brough says the city flushed the property, eliminating much of the drainage-stench problem.
“They’ve taken better action in the last week,” Brough said.
Good thing, too. Because Brough was ready to top his bucket-of-cabbage stunt at the Layton City Council.
“The next phase was going to be the George Bush shoe moment, where I throw the cabbage at them,” Brough joked, referencing the 2008 press conference where an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at then-president George W. Bush.
The sad part, according to Brough, is that the whole thing could’ve been taken care of in less than a day last fall.
“Just hit it with a disc (harrow), and plow it all under,” he said.
Instead, residents of Pheasant Place have spent the better part of two seasons dreading the simple act of inhaling.
On the bright side, Slawmageddon will one day be just a memory, and the Broughs will soon give birth to their second son. I’ve even got the perfect baby name picked out.
They should call him Cole.
Contact Mark Saal at 801-625-4272 or msaal@standard.net. Follow him on Twitter at @Saalman. Friend him on Facebook at facebook.com/MarkSaal.