Farmers Weekly Review

It is meteorological spring, and Mother Nature is back at it using her thermostat like a roulette wheel. But she is tending to stay on the warm side, as once again the weather people announce that we have had yet another warmest month on record.

Maybe you have been out dibbling and dabbling in the garden already. At several of our projects, we are already experimentally planting — since mid-February. And, yes, outside. I always tell people, especially kids in our garden projects around the county, gardening is really a grand science experiment — every day, every year. You can do the same thing and make plans, and use research-based information, and you still may get a different result based on uncontrollable variables.

We are planting all the cool-season crops in these trials, most by seed, but some by transplants the kids started after they returned from winter break: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and Brussel sprouts, kohlrabi and kale. These cool season vegetables can take significant cool temperatures. But what you might not know is they are all the same plant.

I don’t normally get into the deep botany weeds in my column, but this particular fact takes us down an easy-to-understand path about plant breeding — over the last thousand years or so. And, no, this is not genetically modified organisms … or is it?

Plants have been intentionally manipulated by people since people existed. If you think this is scary, it’s not. Think about every pure-breed dog or any animal, people have looked to increase certain characteristics by choosing to breed individuals that have the desired characteristics together to move the plant or animal to be more useful and or more beautiful.

And even without human “help” nature evolves and changes continuously but so imperceptibly slow that we didn’t notice for hundreds of years. Take the monarch and viceroy butterfly. Monarchs are poisonous to many animals that would normally prey on them due to the toxins in the milkweed plants they ingest as caterpillars. Viceroys are not. But over hundreds of years the viceroy changed its appearance to mimic that of the monarch. This mimicry makes predators less likely to prey on the viceroy because it looks like something that made them sick. Smart? Yes. And it is science on its own without any human intervention.

So, as the first- and second-graders were planting these cool-season crops last week, it gave me the idea to talk about this family of plants and how they all came from one wild mother plant. Brassica oleracea, also known as wild mustard.

You will be seeing a version of this wild mustard in about a month as yellow rocket wildflower starts to pop up along the roadsides and even in your garden. I let them grow and flower, as they are an early pollen source for our beneficial insects.

So how did this single wild plant come to make these six vegetables? Ingenious selection by breeding for different characteristics creating these subspecies. For kale, collards and Chinese broccoli, the plants that exhibited larger leaves were bred for as early as 300 B.C.

Collard greens were bred in Europe. Cabbages — red, green and savoy — were developed from kale (possibly the European collard green) by breeders selecting a larger top (terminal) bud around which the leaves were tightly wrapped, hence the core of the cabbages. These were developed in the 1200s.
Kohlrabi, what I consider to be the queen of the cabbage family and definitely underutilized in both the garden and the kitchen, was also developed from a kale plant. The breeders selected kale that had a thicker stalk. I not only love to grow and eat kohlrabi, but it is the most space age-looking plant in the garden. That will give your neighbors something to talk about.

Now, on to the hottest vegetable of the last few years — the Brussel sprout. Just look at those little morsels of goodness. Their appearance belies their breeding history, they look like and actually are little cabbages borne on a thick stalk. The breeders focused on developing the lateral leaf buds.

When you eat broccoli, did you know you are eating a flower bud? The flower buds and the stems are what we eat. Still, all came from that original wild, weedy mustard. Broccoli was created from a pre-kale in the 1500s. And from one variety of broccoli, cauliflower was developed.

If you think that all of this slow long breeding was only a thing of the past, think again. Have you seen the latest in hot, new vegetables? Broccolini? What is old is new again. In 1993, broccolini was developed from crossing the broccoli we know with Chinese broccoli (also known as kai lan). You know, the plant I mentioned that was originally developed in 300 B.C?

Plant science is amazing, and maybe the next time you are in that produce section of the grocery store, you will, as I do, marvel at all the choices of every shape, size, and flavor a little more!