A healthy side shoot with around 6 leaves is a good candidate. I’ve been taking cuttings since it was around 8 months old.

Cutting goes into a pot and left to root.

This is a good size side shoot to take a cutting from.

By December it was taller than me and we had been eating it regularly.

By July we had started eating it and it was still growing well.

By June it had filled out and grown about foot.

This isn’t the actual cutting, but it looked much like this.

The cutting was planted into the garden in February. You can see the soil in the pictures below looks darker and crumblier. There was some nice organic matter mixed in with the squidgy clay. By the time I planted the purple tree collard in, everything had broken down nicely. I then covered it and left the worms and decomposing bacteria to do their thing for a couple of months.

When I made this new bed, I mixed in about 2 months’ worth of kitchen waste (peelings, cores – any uncooked vegetable and fruit matter) and 2 shredded Amazon delivery boxes. You can see the large lumps of clay soil. I reused old bricks and breeze blocks to make the bed.I did some hole composting over winter before I planted the purple tree collard into this bed. Also, as it’s going to be there a while it is worth adding lots of nutrient rich organic matter, like compost. I would maybe suggest that you don’t start your purple tree collard in a spot that has had cabbages growing in it year after year. I’m not sure whether purple tree collard is susceptible to club root, but because the purple tree collard is perennial it can happily stay in the same spot for years. It is said that you should avoid growing annual brassicas (cabbage, kale, sprout, cauliflower type things) in the same spot year after year as they can develop club root. They like fertile alkaline soil so the clay soil in London is perfect. Once you have one, creating cuttings is rather easy so in a couple of years my lawn may have been replaced by a purple tree collard forest. However, because of the rarity of the plant and the wonderful provider that it has become, I think it was well priced. The cutting may have seemed rather small for the £7.95 price tag with delivery added on top of it. This means that the only way to get one would be off eBay or a specialist website like (like I did) or from someone who has one. They are not sold by the usual commercial vegetable providers.

Even if they did produce seeds, they may have crossed with another local brassicas so you wouldn’t be certain of how the offspring would turn out. Because they are perennial, they don’t tend to produce seed. Because they’re tougher they hold together much better than the other kales. Alternatively (and this is my favourite way to eat them) they make fantastic kale crisps. My only gripe is that whilst being tasty, the large leaves are quite tough, so a good old stew is required. I put a standard folding garden chair in front of it today (20/03/20) for scale. I guestimated this to be around 8 feet tall.

Purple tree collards