I'll start by saying I don't know the answer to your question, and now I'll just babble for a bit. In general, many plants will go 'vegetative' again if you cut them back before they flower. Right now I have 3 types of kale that are 1 year+ The first is a tree collard - so that's expected to live 5 years. The others are lacinato & standard curly green kale. All three are now enjoying their second winter with lush growth. The tree collard has been flowering and now the lacinato is about to flower. I was told to take cuttings when the tree collard goes to flower, so I snipped them and have a bunch in a rooting mix (peat, fine woody compost & potting soil). I don't see any roots yet, but none of the small leaves have wilted, so I think they will do fine. There are also another bunch of florets coming up, so I guess I'll take more cuttings. I could eat them like broccoli, but I'd rather make more plants. I could't resist to let at least few flowers go to seed, even though these are generally propagated vegetatively. What I really want to do is hybridize the tree collards with the lacinato, to improve the taste of the tree collards. Now it looks like they will both be flowering at the same time, so I might just have a chance at it...

thats cool. im interested in crossing a purple peacock broccoli [(which is a red russian kale x green goliath broccoli) (picture below) (in my opinion the head is small and loose but is ok for only being half broccoli. i can see why the parent had to be green goliath. it says on sites that it has plenty of side shoots at least.)] with some other type of broccoli or something. im really interested in making a late bolting broccoli for here in central florida by crossing a heirloom huge head broccoli with a collard. This guy http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/kalards-a-kale-collard-cabbage-cross/ claims/thinks and has a picture of a green glaze collard (which is already a collard x cabbage hybrid) x "dragon" kale. What do you guys think? also theodosia im down to trade seeds with you.

Not sure I understand correctly so feel free to ignore this if I misunderstood your question. Are you growing for consumption or specifically for seed production and saving? The primary focus will determine some of the answer as they are often at cross-purposes. Growing all of them for consumption is no problem and is done all the time. "Therefore if I want to grow a brassica rapa (Chinese cabbage variety) and a brassica oleracea (kale/collards etc) together that this is okay; is this true?" But when you get into pollinating any of them for seed saving it can get very complex and time consuming - which is why it is primarily a commercial operation. They are self-infertile and you would have to grow multiple plants and do lots of bag-in-hand pollinating of multiple whole bloom clusters among those multiple plants and would still end up with a large amount of sterile seed. Dave PS: this would be a good discussion for the Seed Saving forum here and you might get more help there..

Hazel, We were typing at the same time. No, I do not, would not, will not direct sow broccoli (or most other brassica) seeds in the Spring, although some people do it with cabbage, and it generally works because most cabbage plants can tolerate June heat. It also works with collards. The reason why we use transplants for crops like broccoli is that we always, always and without fail, are in a huge race to try to get our cool season crops to produce before enough heat arrives to shut them down, make them bolt, or cause them to have very unpleasant flavor. Starting seeds indoors at the right time and transplanting the plants into the ground at the right time is the key to getting a good harvest. You can be off some years by just a couple of weeks and get no harvest at all. Even worse, you have wasted garden space on a crop that failed to produce a harvest. Direct sowing in our climate doesn't work well with broccoli, cauliflower or brussels sprouts because there's not enough time in between that point where soil is warm enough for seeds to germinate and that point where it suddenly is too hot. That's why we don't direct sow some cool season crops---our cool season is shockingly short. That is why the OSU Garden Planning Guide, linked below, lists "plants" as the method to use when planting broccoli. If your chances of getting a crop from direct-sown seed were equally as good as getting them from transplants, the planning guide would so state as "seeds or plants" or something similar. OSU Garden Planning Guide Even with the cool-season crops that we do direct sow, like carrots, beets and spinach, sometimes the seeds are so slow to germinate in cold early Spring soil that we get a poor yield or no yield or maybe eventually a good yield that we've spent far too much time babying along in an effort to get that harvest before it gets too hot or too dry or too whatever. In general, since you're in the middle part of the state, I'd aim at putting the broccoli plants in the ground in latest March or early April (later than OSU probably says but late freezes are hard on broc plants so I try to plant late enough to avoid late freezes) and expect a harvest around the end of May. If you want an earlier broccoli harvest, you'll have to put your transplants in the ground earlier and cover them up. With the brassicas whose crops are the flower heads, like broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower, exposure for even one week to temperatures below a certain level can cause the plants to produce button-sized heads or no heads at all, so we can't plant too early either. (This is because exposure to temperatures at a certain level once the plants are a certain size triggers these biennials to think they are in their second season and rush to go to seed.) It is like being Goldilocks, struggling to find a planting time that is just right since our weather doesn't make it easy. We hurt our chances of getting a harvest if we plant too early or too late or from seed instead of transplants or if the weather turns nastily cold after the plants are a specific size or if the weather gets too hot too early. Ha! Re-reading that makes me think we should be grateful to get any harvest at all because Oklahoma weather is notorious for changing on a dime. If you can grow cabbage successfully, you can grow broccoli successfully. I generally transplant them into the ground at the same time. I have better luck with brussels sprouts and cauliflower if I transplant them much earlier than the cabbage and broccoli. It can take a while (like, years and years, to be honest) to figure out the precise timing that works in your growing conditions, and you can't do it so much by the calendar as by soil temperatures/air temperatures because plants don't respond to calendar dates. They respond to specific climatic conditions. Every year after we moved here I tried one planting date after another to find the timing that worked for me in an average year, and it took just as much experimentation to find the planting dates that work in a year when we get hot early and when we stay really cold really late. The dates that worked in Texas didn't work so well for me here, and the dates recommended by OSU did not necessarily work in my microclimate and with our seemingly changing climate, so I just had to keep trying until I found what worked. The OSU Planning Guide is great, but the plants don't read it and your microclimate as well as your weather in any given year will determine how well a specific planting period works for you. So, just experiment to find what works. Usually the dates that are best for me fall somewhere within the range given by OSU, but sometimes not. My microclimate stays shockingly cold some years very late so I have to plant some things, like broccoli, a bit later than recommended to account for that. It drove me nuts in the beginning, but I figured it out. You'll do the same. Blame a lot of this struggle to plant at the right time on our climate. If we lived somewhere with a nice, cool summer, we could grow broccoli all summer long and get a nice harvest, but that's not our reality. Dawn