A community of seed savers has a recipe to revive rare varieties of collard greens

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel eat them occasionally at G.C... with vinegar...
..."Together, Seed Savers Exchange and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange requested more than 60 heirloom collard varieties from the USDA’s collection of Davis and Morgan’s seeds and began adding the seeds to their yearly offerings. In 2020, Wallace and the Heirloom Collard Project held a virtual Collard Week festival. That’s when she asked Mitchell, the up-and-coming seed steward, to do a workshop on saving collard seed.

“I was in the middle of finals for my last semester at school,” recalls Mitchell, a Temple University graduate. “But I couldn’t say no to her — you know, no one says no to Ira Wallace,” Mitchell says with a laugh.

Last year she joined Davis, Wallace and others at a meeting about the Heirloom Collard Project’s future. Mitchell now plans to grow several varieties from the project — including one she’s especially excited about. The “Moses Smith Yellow Cabbage Collard” is an African American stewarded heirloom that hails from the same region of North Carolina as Mitchell’s ancestors. She plans to sell the seeds next year, once they’ve matured. This is key to the project’s vision of finding new, energetic seed stewards to revive heirloom varieties.

The Heirloom Collard Project is hoping to find grants to help finance their work. The project also wants to identify varieties best suited for commercial use, such as the “Miss Annie Pearl Counselman Collard,” which Seed Savers Exchange added to its catalog in 2021.

“They don’t have to be the next kale, the next superfood,” Mitchell says about collards. “Because they’re special — and they’re special to me.”

When cooked right, greens are a comfort food with no equal.