Food-Gardening Lessons From A Wartime Victory Garden

Flowering Kale: Beautiful Edible Color

Cabbage
Lowly kale has a modern cousin that brings vivid color and food to early spring gardens. Flowering kale features dense and leafy heads in exotic purple and pink foliage as well as some odd thread-leaf forms that offer bold textural differences. You can blend kale with early season edible flowers like violas and calendula to make rainbow salads from a single potted composition. To make sure all edible leaves and petals are chemical-free, fill pots and troughs with Black Gold Waterhold Cocoblend Potting Soil before planting your kale. Then refresh the soil and replant with heat lovers when the kale bolts to flower around June.

Flowering Kale: Brassica Ornamental Purple
Flowering Kale: Brassica Ornamental Purple

About Maureen Gilmer

Maureen Gilmer is celebrating her 40th year in California horticulture and photojournalism as the most widely published professional in the state. She is the author of 21 books on gardening, design and the environment, is a widely published photographer, and syndicated with Tribune Content Agency. She is the weekly horticultural columnist for the Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs and contributes to Desert Magazine, specializing on arid zone plants and practices for a changing climate. She works and lives in the remote high desert for firsthand observations of native species. Her latest book is The Colorful Dry Garden published by Sasquatch Books. When not writing or photographing she is out exploring the desert on her Arabian horse. She lives in Morongo Valley with her husband Jim and two rescue pit bulls. When not writing or photographing she is usually out riding her quarter horse.

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