Like other non-heading collard greens, this sturdy and cold-hardy vegetable produces large smooth, oval-shaped leaves that are really nice to harvest in fall, winter, and spring.  It then grows tender little raab that are delicious steamed or stir-fried.  If you don’t harvest all of the flower buds, they grow up to 5 feet tall with edible yellow flowers.  That’s when most brassicas would up and die.  Not tree collards.  Instead, they grow little shoots from the base of the stem and put on lots of new growth in fall so that you can enjoy a harvest year after year.

Our mother plants survived the record-setting cold winter of 2013-14 with only minor setbacks.  This is the first generation of seedlings from that crop.