Gardening: Some vegetables can survive freezing, such as cabbage, collards and kale

Some of the vegetable plants you can transplant early without fearing loss to freezing are the cole crops such as cabbage, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts and collards. Some seed companies sell assortments of cabbage seeds, plants that will yield early, others throughout the season and some much later.

All cole crops, including Tronchuda, sold by some as a kale, by others as collards or even as its own genus, may be planted out early, and last a full year in your soil unless you harvest so much that you want a better-looking plant to replace it.

I’m hearing that some gardeners are removing those plants in the heat of summer, but it’s not necessary. They tolerate heat as well as cold. If you plant to harvest rather heavily from those leafy vegetables, plan on starting new plants indoors in July so you’ll have abundance for autumn and winter harvest. The soil will be too warm for outdoor sowing of these seeds in high summer.

Those of us reared in the North think of collards as “Southern” food, but they grow in the North, and are delicious and nutritious, meatier than cooked cabbage. Those folks who use a lot of fatback or bacon to cook collards are adding cholesterol that reduces the overall healthfulness of this easily grown green. It and Tronchuda look like large-leaved cabbage when growing. We usually remove the white midrib and roll up the sides, slicing them into ribbons before we sauté them.

Two varieties of broccoli will produce from late spring until nearly Thanksgiving: Apollo and the Brazilian-bred Piracicaba put out side shoots over and over, all through heat and cold. Apollo seeds are available from Territorial Seed Co. Burpee and Park Seed Co. also sell that variety. Piracicaba seed is sold by Fedco, Adaptive, Turtle Tree and Nichols Garden Nursery seeds.

Cole crops are vulnerable to some insects in our area, mainly aphids and imported cabbage butterfly larvae. Some folks have reported cabbage root maggot damage, too. Many references call for repelling those with wood ashes, but that’s very bad for our already alkaline soil. A better prevention for those maggots is the use of squares of tar paper necklacing each plant. Cut a hole in the middle of a 6-inch square, and scissor a cut to that hole, then slide the tar paper to surround the trunk of the plant.

Aphids may be blasted off with water, destroyed with soapy spray (not detergent), or if you notice aphids prefer a single plant, then leave it in place — if you pull it, aphids will infest other plants of that variety. Or watch weeds such as sowthistle, for at times one will be covered with aphids, and nothing else is affected.

I trap yellow jackets with a specific trap, but tolerate other wasps unless they try to build a nest in a doorway. After the foothills fire in the 1990s, Boise experienced a huge influx of wasps, and in my yard, that number has not diminished. Wasps patrol my garden beds along with me, and they nab newly hatched larvae such as cabbage butterfly larvae to feed their own hatch. I haven’t seen a tomato hornworm in years, and suffer little damage from butterfly larvae. Early in the season, wasps also consume many aphids.

These cole crops (Brassicas) should be rotated, if possible, for they are heavy feeders, and rotation should prevent soil-borne disease and some insect invasions. Plants should be in full sun, where they have room to spread, and receive an inch of water per week. In my garden, the beautiful scarlet kale and the heavily frilled varieties of kale succumbed to early frosts and drought, but Tuscan kale and Galega de Folhas Lisas survive.