Growing South... Notes from Plot 14
Pertinent Perennials
Jane
Wilbraham
Jane Wilbraham is a multi-disciplinary artist, proud plotholder of Plot 14 and committee member for the Longton Nursery Allotments Association.
The self-managed Longton Nursery Allotments, a 2-minute walk over the road from us here in Sydenham is one of the joys of our neighbourhood.
Much-deserved winners of the Lewisham Best Allotment Site 2019!
We love being able to use Jane's produce from Plot 14 in our menus, and as she's taught us all such a great deal we thought it was time to start sharing Jane's green-thumbed notes from the allotment with you all.
This week Jane is taking comfort in the certainty of kale.
BW
Pertinent Perennials
Taunton Deane kale is an odd beast. It belongs to the family of plants described by Carl Linnaeus in 1753 as Brassica Oleracea and in the cultivar group ‘acephala’ or ‘without a head’, and while this neatly distinguishes the headless kale from the brainy cauliflower and cabbage, it’s the perennial characteristic that I’m interested in here.
I love all things brassica, from kale to cabbage to cauliflower to kohlrabi to turnips to mustard greens, which is astonishing given the fact that the consumption of warm, salted cabbage cooking water was drilled into me by my mum who had suffered the privations of a rural, wartime upbringing where nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, was wasted.
It was perhaps inevitable that my research into unusual brassica varieties led me to Mandy at Incredible Vegetables in Devon, who specialises in preserving and re-introducing perennial veg to home growers. The history of Taunton Deane is somewhat hazy. Being a plant that is propagated by vegetative cuttings as it does not flower and set seed, the best guess is that at some point ‘cottagers kale’ (an annual variety mentioned by Charles Darwin in ‘The Gardeners Chronicle’, 1860 whose name gives away its everyday usage) was crossed with a variety of sprout then re-crossed with a variety of purple sprouting broccoli.
You may well ask, why bother? But if you could have fresh, sweet cabbage greens all year round, reliably supplementing your main crop, adding variety and filling the hungry gap in April and May, why wouldn’t you?
In all likelihood cuttings of this plant were most likely passed amongst West Country kitchen gardeners from the latter part of the last century, bypassing the Victorian seed merchants and their cornucopia of annual varieties and very successfully sneaking under the radar to arrive in the modern gardening age.
A plant from one small cutting will grow to a huge size, sometimes up to two or three metres high and wide, and will keep growing for 5 years until it runs out of steam. My plant is in its third year now so I will be taking some cuttings soon to begin the next generation.
Nothing lasts forever, but in uncertain times when getting through another week can feel like a lifetime, Taunton Deane perennial kale comes close.
Jane Wilbraham, 10th Nov 2020
@lnallotmentsse26
Longton Nursery Allotments
