Have you tried ebay or even googling for a seed company.

btg:

This subject was a thread in this (or another?) forum last year sometime.

It seems there is a lot of confusion about this plant, and worse, a lot of people trying to take advantage of others.

There's a lot of people selling "tree collards" including amateurs and some small mailorder nurseries (I found at least one outside of California). gobluedjm has good advice.

Shop around and beware of the BS.

Personally, I'm not sure what the hype is all about.

Joe

Is this a tree collard? My mom grew them from cuttings and this one is about a year old or so.

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Hi Joe,
Have you seen musaboru's pictures of tree collards? You'd have to love collard greens and know how to cook them to understand. The nutritional value and good taste is an added bonus. Basically, a tree collard will keep on growing a branching giving you a supply of collard green leaves from several branches from the time it's a small plant. Plus it lives and produces for several years.
A collard plant on the other hand, only grows a couple of feet high, does not branch out(all leaves grow from one main stem) and it only gives you so many leaves before it dies which is usually one season. So every year, you have to dig up the dead stalks and replant from seeds. You can get from one collard tree what it'll take to get from several collard plants. People that plant collards must plant a garden full of them just to get what southerners call " a mess of greens". I hope this helps you understand what all the hype is about.

Hiya brownthumb.

I know collards well. I used to live in South Carolina and when I was with Park Seed, we grew dozens of varieties of collards.

The oldtimers around the area grew collards just about all year and some had plants easily 2 to 4 feet across and probably more than 2 feet high. And they didn't have a "garden full of them". With a small good block of plants, they were harvesting "a mess of greens" a couple of times a week simply by harvesting the outer leaves of the maturing plants.

Those that harvested young plants (the way I think they should be eaten) simply did successive sowings every few weeks so that they'd always have a young crop coming along. It was just an easy extension of vegetable gardening. Seed sowing is easy.

I get a feeling that tree collards don't shoot up to more than 4 feet in short order. And although I haven't tasted tree collards (I have tasted dozens of varieties of regular collards), I don't know if they taste any better, same as or not quite as good as regular smaller collards.

So you see, someone's going to have to convince me that this tree collards concept is more than just novelty.

Joe

Hi Joe,
I'm glad you're familiar with collards. I guess I initially got the impression that you weren't. Anyway, I'm not about convincing anyone of anything. I'll leave that job for someone else.
Personally, I think it's just a matter of preference and I prefer not to spend a lot of time digging up, replanting and caring for several plants when I can just take care of one or two and get the same results.
By the way, the tree collard variety that I'm seeking gets a purple hue to the leaves and veins in the winter. They have a milder sweet taste to them but I guess you'll never know, not until you're convinced anyway. Then again, maybe some of the varieties that you're familiar with have this characteristic and flavor and if so, you're not missing out. To you it can remain a novelty.

One site refers to them as "Walking Stick Kale," which may be one reason for the confusion. This also may be what Ken Fern at Plants for a Future lists as "Perpetual Kale."

If anyone is still looking, I saw tree collard plants for sale at Berkeley Horticulture in Berkeley this week.
: )

Greg. 5109121706

Annie's Annuals sells them too.

The last thing they told me is that they were not in stock