Red Russian Kale

Red Russian kale is the most tender and sweet of the kales. The deeply serrated blue-grey leaves with purple-red stems are handsome enough for the flower border and produce for the kitchen from late summer through winter and into spring. It is exceptionally frost hardy and improves after a hard freeze, as the starches in the leaves turn to sugar. Botanically it is a Brassica napus, a Siberian kale, rather than the oleracea of the curly types.

Sow directly a half inch deep in early spring for a cool-season crop, and again in midsummer to late summer for the autumn and winter harvest, which is the better one. Set plants 12 to 18 inches apart in rich soil with compost worked in, and keep them watered; drought makes the leaves bitter. Pick the lower leaves from the outside, or cut the whole young plant for salad, and it regrows. A mulch sees it through winter in zone 6 and milder.

When it bolts in spring the yellow flowers and buds are edible and sweet, worth harvesting before the plant exhausts itself, and the bees like what you leave. Cabbage white caterpillars and aphids are the pests; a row cover from planting handles the first and a hard spray of water the second. Deer and rabbits graze kale, so it belongs inside the fence.