My Favorite Greens | From the Test Gardens

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April 11th, 2011

It will be a while before test varieties and other spring greens I sowed a while back will be ready to eat, but…

You know those sprouts that kind of look like broccoli at the top of the kale that lived through the winter? I think those are my favorite greens. Probably it’s because I haven’t had fresh greens from the garden for a while, and also because they don’t take any work. They just happen. And they do taste good. It’s a shame that many gardeners don’t eat them, or keep their kale (and other brassicas) around so they can enjoy these first spring greens.

We had a really cold winter, so not many of my kale plants survived. Enough did, though, to get quite a handful of sprouts today (which a farmer friend once called “spring broccoli”). The flower buds were just starting to form and were still deep inside the bushy young leaves. The stalks were very tender and I could just pluck them off. Later, there will be so many of these I won’t be able to keep up and they’ll become a big bush of kale blossoms. And I’ll be gorging myself on my next favorite greens. —Debbie Leung, Olympia, Washington

Tags: broccoli, greens, kale

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