We are benefiting from the broccoli in the garden at the moment. Come to think of it we have been harvesting the plants since the middle of summer as some of them decided to flower early. Broccoli is a popular vegetable and is very productive. Practically all of the broccoli can be used, it's a real multiple-use crop. Peeled and chopped stems are excellent stir-fried, and the leaves make tasty cooked greens. The plants are packed with vitamins, especially vitamin A. I find broccoli one of the easiest vegetables to feed to children. Close on its heels though is kale. We grew two kinds and these are coming close to flowering about now. In the shops we tend to get the old leaves but if you grow the plant for yourself you can benefit by picking the small flower heads that look nearly identical to broccoli. The young shoots are so tasty that you can even use them in salads. Kale's attractive greenery packs over ten times the vitamin A as the same amount of iceberg lettuce and has more vitamin C per weight than orange juice. The plant provides more calcium than equivalent amounts of cow's milk. It can be grown in any well fed garden with very little effort, it even seems to thrive on neglect. Like most members of the brassica family, kale is descended from sea cabbage. This is why the leaves are waxy to conserve moisture. It's a biennial, storing food the first year to help it produce the next year's seeds (that's why those first-year leaves are so nutritious). And it's quite frost-hardy, lasting through winter in many locations-even under snow. Broccoli and kale both achieve their best flavours after the frost, so I would say that now is a great time to get harvesting!
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