In the 1800s, Jersey Island Was Covered With 12-Foot-Tall Kale
atlasobscura.comIf you'd like to grow tree collard / tree kale varieties yourself, check out Project Tree Collard:
https://www.projecttreecollard.org/
They grow great in California (and places with a similar climate), producing harvestable leaves year round.
This is great. I have this vision we should all have two careers now. Our current M to F tech jobs and being farmers again. All of us. Like the industrial revolution has this last step. Back to farming but this time with tech.
Wouldn't this be inefficient, laborious, and dependent on a land distribution that's starkly at odds with the urban areas where this romanticized view of agriculture gets espoused by techies?
(TBC: Love hobby gardening, community gardens are cool, I hear some folks are doing cool stuff with urban agriculture, just seems weird to imagine it as a ubiquitous second career)
Home farming can make use of small spaces to farm some part of our diets. No need to transport the final product, o need to use a blanket of insecticides and herbicides because the manual labour of caring for each plant is very distributed. Regenerative farming is also trivial at this scale. Large scale farming is often as efficient as it is destructive.
It only sounds good on paper
But I’ve had a small garden for years and it’s 100% not worth it due to the small yield and extremely high labor.
And just because you have a small garden does not mean agricultural pests are easily managed… in fact they are still absolutely a massive problem.
Big farms are 100% better suited at growing crops. An hour I spend on my garden is probably only 30 seconds on a large farm if you compare on yield.
This is a problem I often see when folks grow annuals. Perennials are way lower labor, and one of the reasons I encourage community gardens to avoid being entirely focused on annuals.
Why still work monday to friday then, monday to wednesday should be sufficient. There is farming to be done after all.
I learned this recently from another post here on HN:
"Brassica oleracea is a plant species that includes many common cultivars, such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, Savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan."
If you look really closely at Broccoli, you can see the structure of the little buds are identical to Brussels sprouts just scaled way down.
I don’t know why I enjoy that fact so much but I sure do!
They’re really common here in the north of Portugal - everybody with a cottage garden, which is everybody, has a grove of them. They’re the principal ingredient in caldo verde (a soup that is eaten pretty much daily, by pretty much everyone) up here - further south they use collard greens, but here it’s all kale. When we moved here we were gifted a few plants, and two and a bit years on they’re going strong, and we’ve propagated them to a few dozen - ours aren’t 12 feet tall, more like 6, but either way, it’s a common home crop, and is mostly human, rather than animal, fodder.
As to walking sticks, haven’t seen them used for that here, but people do use the dried stems as trellises for beans and whatnot.
I saw an old documentary on this called 'Day of the Triffids'...
An amazing story that deserves a re-do, movies-wise. I'm pretty sure the underlying social conditions of the books' narrative are as relevant today as ever. Well, now I think of it, the blind enslaving the sighted might just be a tad on the nose for some ..
Why do they always go for the eyes?!
ROFL. I did read the book.
Where's Jersey Island? Is it anywhere near the island of Jersey by any chance?
The actual title is "In the 1800s, This British Isle Was Covered in Groves of 12-Foot-Tall Kale"; it's not clear why it was edited.
The original title sounds a bit click-baity to me, so maybe that's why.
Yeah, as an American I assumed it was talking someplace around New Jersey. The original title is probably clearer for those less familiar with the UK.
I'm in the UK but I was initially left wondering if it was something to do with New Jersey, it really isn't that clear. And I've been to Jersey in the Channel Islands (off France, not off California!)
Before we annoy any islanders, Jersey is not actually part of the UK.
More broadly, it's quite rare that things are this way round - usually when there's not much context the US interpretation applies more often than not.
> Before we annoy any islanders, Jersey is not actually part of the UK.
Jersey isn't part of the UK, but it's not exactly an independent country either.
If international diplomacy and constitutional law interests you, it's quite interesting.
Jersey is an autonomous, self governing Bailiwick and a Dependency of the Crown. It has an ISO country code and TLD, however the UK is responsible for representing the territory internationally in most cases, including at the UN. This is because the Crown delegates that responsibility to Her Majesty's Government. Jersey has no representation within the UK democracy itself and cannot sign international agreements independently, however it informally has relationships with lots of international bodies and other countries including the UK. Jersey has never been part of the EU and remains its own customs area. There are millions of other little warts and curious edge cases.
As someone from Jersey, I never quite know what to answer when someone asks what country I'm from.
> As someone from Jersey, I never quite know what to answer when someone asks what country I'm from.
So when do Jersey, Guernsey & Sark field their own Football and Rugby teams like England, Scotland & Wales, its not like the off-shore tax havens cant afford the talent!
Still I wonder what the vitamin K content is like for these 12ft plants and if they are any good for PotLikker?
Reminds me of Big Cabbage on the Sto Plains between Uberwald and Ankh-Morpork:
"Billing itself as the green heart of the plains, Big Cabbage boasts The Biggest Cabbage in the World, which turns out to be a building erected in stressed concrete to look like a hundred-foot high cabbage, in which a multitude of cabbage-related ideas may be wondered at, bought, and taken home as souvenirs of an exciting holiday. Cabbage Beer may be bought, as can cabbage cigars, rolled on the inner thighs of alluring young local maidens."
Jersey's rugby team is actually not too bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_Reds
But like sibling says, it can only play in English leagues.
Also the thing about being a tax haven is that the government doesn't capture a huge percentage of the revenue flowing through it. The government is by no means poor, but it's not filthy rich either (unlike some of the inhabitants).
They do have their own teams, but the governing bodies don't let them play internationally.
I'm from Jersey (as in the place this article was written about) and I assumed it would be about somewhere in New Jersey.
Yeah that's exactly what they mean here.
I used to go blackberrying on the common above the cliffs at Portlet with my grandfather’s cabbage stalk cane to hold back the thorns…
These remind me of the tree collards that I grow in my garden. Just pull off leaves from the bottom for dinner.
How are the leaves? I've let kale overwinter and it gets pretty tall but any new leaves in the spring are too fibrous and tough for my taste. I prefer collards in most cases. I'd be interested in what cultivar you grow.
The leaves are great, as long as you harvest them while they are green. I'm not sure what the cultivar is as I usually let them go to seed, collect the seeds and start over when they get too tall. Brassicas tend to cross pollinate, as far as I understand it. They get super tall, but I usually stop after 5 ft. and start over.
We let our kale overwinter last year and were impressed at how tense and sweet it was in the spring. Russian Red, mostly, USDA Hardiness Zone 7-8
It seems to be specific variety called Brassica oleracea longata (mentioned in the article) although in some places (https://www.victoriananursery.co.uk/Walking-Stick-Cabbage-Se...) it's called Brassica oleracea palmifolia which is a more widely known variety (cavolo nero in Italian).
How is it with plant genetics / breeding and taxonomy? When do you assert that something's a specific variety and apply a name to it?
I have some of the seeds from this variety of kale. It’s called walking stick kale. I’ve been trying to find a place to plant it.
Lived there for years & never knew about this.
how did it taste? i'd imagine horrible otherwise some pre-Sweetgreen would use them up for $15 salads
Like any other brassica leaf - really similar to broccoli leaves, if I had to nail it down. Nutty, savoury, hint of bitterness. The leaves are pretty tough though, and have some fascinating hydrophobic properties, so need chopping finely and then either frying or boiling until they’re soft.
And it didn't immediately become a tech hub? How???
got some 4' tuscan kale growing in the front yard right now in fact. Now I'm gonna see if I can make a walking cane!