Grow Curled Kale in Zone 5 — Make It Biennial to Increase Yields

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A lot of friends prefer Asian leafy vegetables over kale. Because kale is not as tender as baby bok choy when stir fried. It’s true. But kale can be prepare in other delicious way. Like baked kale chips or just chopped with Bragg Organic Ginger & Sesame Dressing. My friends love them. The best thing is kale can be harvested from April until November in zone 5 (Actually with light protection, it can be harvested until December even January. But it’s so cold out there. Who wants to go picking the kale leaves?). It’s easy to grow with great yield.

Begin indoors 3-4 weeks before final spring frost. Plant 3-4 seeds 1/4” deep per cell and 3-4” apart in the garden in nitrogen-rich, organic, well-drained soil with a pH of 6.0-7.5. Germinates in 3-10 days, thinning out best starts to 1 plant per pot or every 12-18” in the garden as true leaves establish. Kale benefits from fertilizer every 4 weeks.

In fall, cover it with falling leaves or compost food scraps in the raised bed to raise the soil temperature. They will come back second year. Before frost hit in second year, propagate some kale plant from cuttings and protect them with fall leaves, you will have a new batch next spring.

In spring 2021, all our kale plants were survived. The best one look like this (on March 19, 2021):

The worst one have not green leaves but the buds on the stems were ready to grow.

Withe the wilted leaves and stems removed, they grew fast. Here is what they look like on Apr 7th.

On Apr 20, 2021, they are ready to be harvested. Here is the picture on Apr 28.

You can harvest kale a lot earlier this way.

In summer, harvest the tender leaves and flowers for salad. Otherwise it’ll bolt to seed in the summer warmth. Here is the picture taken on Sep 22, 2021. The plants produced a lot of leaves and flowers all summer. We were able to pick leaves in early December.