The students have returned to school, your mailbox is crammed with a new crop of seed catalogs, the leaves are falling, and the days are getting shorter. Drive by your local garden center or roadside stand and the displays are filled with ornamental kales and cabbages. Autumn has arrived.
Long after the first snowfall and frost have erased most traces of life in your garden, ornamental kale and cabbage glow brightly in beds and containers. Both are members of the Brassica family, which also includes broccoli, turnip, mustard, and cauliflower.
These biennial crops are grown as annuals, and come in a beautiful range of colors and leaf shapes. Flowering cabbage has broad, flat, leaves, while the leaves of kale are curly and frilly around the edges. The plants come in shades of white, green, pink, coral, purple, and red, and they often grow about a foot wide and 15 inches tall. Their colors, which are concentrated in the center of the plant, intensify as the temperatures get lower, a characteristic loved by gardeners.
Ornamental cabbage and kale look beautiful in the front of a border or mixed together in window boxes and containers. Combine them with chrysanthemums, sedum, ornamental grasses, and asters for a beautiful fall scene. Their shallow root systems make it easy to transplant them from the garden to the indoors.
Place them in eight- or ten-inch pots in bright light and a cool location for a long-lasting display. You also can use them in flower arrangements. For a quick and easy tabletop arrangement, rest a plant–roots and all–in an opaque shallow vase. To keep the plants thriving, remove their lower leaves as they begin to fade.
Ornamental cabbage and kale are generally planted in late summer, since they are more prone
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