Just putting up a holding place for now. I have a project I am working on with collards. Approximately 20 collard varieties mostly heirlooms for the initial cross. Last year we had severe D4 rated drought. I planted out about forty plants. No additional water, or care, true subsistence grow or die mentality. Being in the south there is severe insect pressure. We also had severe freeze in the winter and then a second non typical late freeze. I ended up with two survivors after the first freeze but the second freeze left me with one plant that set seed which is now ripening on the plant. I plan to keep replanting from the survivors to develop as hardy of a collard as I can. I am also going to still add in the remaining individual heirlooms I have seeds left over until they are completely used up to make sure the survivors get s chance to intermix some more before it becomes survival of the fittest only.
This sounds like a wonderful project. I’m happy to hear about the success you’ve had so far!
I grew collards last year at the end of my kale row. Left kale and collards in the ground to overwinter only collards survived. They are starting to put out leaves but it was slower than expected. I’m learning so much on seed saving and growing direct seeded plants. Things can happen much slower than you might expect. And some things much quicker. Be observant and wait.
You might want to try spigarello genetics- it is an oleracea from southern Italy which has performed much better than any other kales in my often hot/dry subtropical garden. Flavor is much better than other kales as well.
I’m only growing Brassica carinata now though- much better flavor and performance for me as a winter leafy brassica. It doesnt seem to be widely known in the USA from what I can tell from the other side of the pacific.
Ooh, what is the flavor like? I love tasty brassicas.
Spigarellos is a tall perennial kale like B. oleracea, originally from southern Italy, so very tolerant of heat and dry once established. I think it is distantly related to most cold weather kales since it was the only strain that reliably set seed for me in the subtropics and it tasted much much nicer than any kale I ever tried. Beautiful blue silvery leaves. White/cream flowers. Definitely worth a try in the warmer parts of the USA.
I will check it out. I am always throwing two to three kale leaves in a blender with a cup of frozen mixed berries and some water and then some nutritional yeast or other vitamin containing food and blending it up into a nice smoothie. So I do like my kale.
Ooh, it’s a perennial kale? I’d really like to encourage all my brassicas to be perennials, so I can harvest from them all the time, all year round.
I found in practice in my unirrigated garden the spigarello growth slowed to a crawl during droughts, eating quality dropped, but the upside was that it resumed production of tasty leaves with a week of rain falling. Overall though the slow establishment and low productivity meant I discontinued it in favour of Brassica carinata. I don’t mind having a feast of brassica greens through the cool months when they grow like weeds, then eat different fresh greens through the summer instead. In practice 12 month production for a lot of crops is just a big welcome mat for various pest species to move in.
Food for thought (pun intended) about the buildup of crop-eating bugs! Although, if you were patient about it, wouldn’t their high populations also invite the predator species in, and then your garden would wind up in balance and the plants would be fine anyway?
I never get a lot of pest pressure, just sometimes enough to reduce eating quality. I am a big fan of John Kempfs model that plants accumulate surplus nitrogen as free amino acids when other factors limit their ability to turn it into finished protein, and that insects rely on those free amino acids to grow and reproduce. I have seen that pattern play out multiple times. Growing with lower fertility inputs and selecting out crops/lines/plants with pest issues means it is rarely a major problem for me anymore. Spigarello often got caterpillar attacks during dry spells, presumably when they had plenty of nitrogen but insufficient water to do anything with it. Brassicas generally dislike hot weather anyway, so I figure why force them to hang on at 40 C when I have alternative species that grow to cropping size in weeks in the cool weather.
That last bit has been our experience, too. I’d love to not have to re-establish dino kale every year, but the aphids just got absurd.
Do you think it would help to cut perennial kales down mostly to the roots in the summer, and have something like bush zucchinis fully shading them? That’s what I was planning to do. I figured I’d keep the roots alive so they could regrow in the fall, while otherwise completely ignoring them and keeping them in full shade in the summer.
Depends on the strain of kale, and the summer. I generally find cutting cool season loving perennials hard during 40C droughts is a death sentence, but cutting them late in summer as it just cools and rains a bit sets them up for regrowth. If they are multistemmed then leaving a few heads in place while the base regenerates can ease the transition, then cutting the rest down later.