Collards! One of my favorite garden greens! When they flower, the bees go wild. And I eventually get to enjoy a different collard harvest. What is it? Come into my post and see!

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Collards are so productive and so reliable. They are related to kale, but I think collards hold up better to hot weather and they taste better then, too. Even when collard leaves are big and old, they taste the same as younger leaves, without getting bitter. I grow and eat a lot of collards!

Planted in the spring, I get plenty of harvest that summer, all through the fall, and into the darkest few weeks of winter. After their first winter, the plants will send up a flowerstalk and put their energy into flowers. I cut the flowerstalks off a lot of them - they are delicious! But I let a few flower.

These are the same collards in both pictures. On the left, the plants are headed into the winter. That's a lot of good eating! In the spring, the plants grow tall with flowerstalks full of blossoms. That's a 6-foot fence in the background!

Bees really like collard flowers! I do, too! I put flowers and unopened buds in salads, omelets, soup, and even on sandwiches. They are more sweet than hot, like kale or mustard flowers can be.

By fall, the bee-pollinated flowers have turned into long pods with 5-10 seeds each. That's a lot of seeds! Way more than what I need to start the next year. But I still save the seed. Why? To grow as sprouts! People pay good money for broccoli sprouts - and collard sprouts are just as good! They don't have to go through a cold cycle to sprout, so they are easy to manage.

When the collard seedpods are ready to harvest, there's a lot of other things going on in the garden! So I strip the pods off, unopened, into a big pillowcase. I hang that in a dry outbuilding, so there's good airflow. Then I can process my seeds in a slower time. And start my collard sprouts for great eating -- a different collard harvest!

My favorite variety of collards is a hybrid, "Flash". I can get Flash collards to last for three years, with two crops of seeds. That's not bad for one planting, although I'd like to get them to become perennials. Because they are hybrids, any plants from my saved seed won't be 'true to type" or just like their parents. But they still make great collard sprouts for eating! Highly recommended!

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What Do You Think?

• Do you like to eat collard greens?
• Have you ever grown collards?
• Do you like sprouts to eat?
• Do you harvest any seeds to sprout for food?

Here are some other flower portraits that you may like, from earlier Color Challenges: Cerinthe // Do Red Roses Taste Better? // Can I Eat Any Rose? // This Rose is Worth Eating! // A Fantastically Delicious Rose // How to Preserve Roses for Food and Crafts // True Blue Lobelia

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** Haphazard Homestead **

*** foraging, gardening, nature, simple living close to the land ***

All content is 100% Haphazard Homestead! My YouTube channel: Haphazard Homestead