Choose a kale variety that best suits your growing climate.
The headed cabbage variety was known to Greeks as krambe and to Romans as brassica or olus; the open, leafy variety (kale) was known in Greek as raphanos and in Latin as caulis.
Throughout this article, this cabbage variety was used except for one separate series of experiments (see two-choice tests), where another variety of B. oleracea (var. acephala: kale) was used for reasons of comparison.
Next, to test for a role of the plant variety, the experiments were repeated with kale, B. oleracea variety acephala, using the same populations of DBM and the parasitoid C. vestalis (thus, no experiments with the parasitoid C. glomerata and CWB on this variety).
On a recent Thursday at my neighborhood farmers' market, one farmer had three different varieties of kale on offer – black kale (also known as cavolo nero, dinosaur kale, dragon tongue, lacinato or Tuscan kale), curly gray-green kale and red Russian kale, another ruffled variety that has red veins and a purplish color.
Use your leftovers to make my favorite apple cinnamon smoothie in your blender: 1 entire apple, 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, 2 tablespoons of chia seeds, 3 jumbo medjool dates (pitted), 2 cups of lacinato kale (although any variety of kale works!), 1 cup of coconut water.
However, note that the 'early attract' hypothesis does not explain why the other Brassica variety (kale) shows a density-dependent increase in the production of DBM-induced volatiles.
Red Russian kale is a variety recognized for its purple-gray leaves and strongly pigmented petioles and leaf veins.
And with different varieties of kale now available, you can narrow the field even further to red Russian, with a purple tint, and the excellent lacinato variety (also called Tuscan kale, black kale and dinosaur kale, for its super-crinkly leaves).
