Man in Overalls - An Ode to Collards (Now with my recipes)

I love growing my groceries in the fall - watching the miracle of growth, having ready-access to the freshest produce money-can't buy, the many flavors, getting to try new varieties - all while the temperature drops to more and more pleasant levels. I enjoy growing most anything in the fall, but, if I had to choose just one thing to grow every fall for the rest of my life, it would be collard greens, hands down. 

It's a health thing and an effort-to-yield calculation, but in the beginning, the roots of my collard green passion were seeded by family.

When I was a kid about 9 or 10, just a couple years into gardening in the front yard, my aunt, the family documentarian showed me a clipping of my late grandfather from the Graceville New (or was it the Jackson County Times?) beneath his 9ft collard greens that he had kept alive multiple years, growing them into small trees.

So I turned up a new garden patch; we purchased a 9-pack of collards, and I planted them, watered them, tended them, picked the worms off of them, talked with my grandmother about them, and finally, harvested a big bunch. My mother helped me cook the "mess" of greens for dinner. And then, when she served everyone's plates, she fixed mine without any collard greens.  When I protested, my mother said, "Oh, but you don't like collard greens." - "I...um, well...." 

So along with a heaping of collard greens, I ate my words that night.

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In addition to family legacies, I love collard greens for their sheer productivity.  I once grew 150lbs of collard greens off 12 plants in 9 months. Compare that to the little "bunches" of organic collards sold at the health food store. They are about 9oz and cost roughly $3. In those terms, I grew over 265 bunches worth $795+. Not to mention that collard greens are among the very few vegetables with a notable amount of protein: 3g to the serving.

It's no wonder that southerners for centuries have relied on collard greens as a dietary staple. When folks had a plateful of collard greens flavored with a cutting of meat from the smokehouse and a side of cornbread, they might have been poor like my people, yes, but they were sitting down to a filling, nutritious meal. Here's to collards!

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Collards are my favorite fall veggie, but I realize they may not be your thing. That's okay. There's a lot to grow in the fall. In short, here in the Deep South, fall is the time to grow your leafy greens (both things like collards as well as salad greens), roots other than potatoes (think carrots, beets), the garlic/onion family, and most of the herbs other than basil, which is a heat lover ( so cilantro, parsley, dill, etc).

For a more complete list of what you can grow, when to grow it, as well a plant spacing guide guide for raised bed food gardening, sign up for my semi-monthly updates to receive my What Can You Grow in a Square resource. 

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But for those of y'all who are collard green fans - in honor of Thanksgiving - allow me to let you in on how to harvest them as well as my three favorite recipes.

In an attempt to minimize farm labor and to meet the spike in demand that Thanksgiving & Christmas create, larger farms tend to grow their collards for a single harvest, around the holidays by "cropping" or cutting off the entire stalk in big "bunches" to capture all the leaves at once. It's a silly way to harvest collards in a home garden, though, because if you do it right, harvesting the outer leaves, you can enjoy them fresh (and tender) all fall, winter and clear into spring.

So far as cooking collard greens, here're the recipes I lean on regularly, in decreasing order of how frequently I cook them (but not necessarily in order of flavor or preference):

And, as always...