How to Grow Collard Greens: The Toughest Green in the Garden

GardenDraft Team · July 18, 2026 · 5 min read

Part of: Garden Planning Guides · Planting Calendar & Frost Date Guides · How to Grow Vegetables — Crop Guides A–Z

Collard greens are the toughest, most forgiving member of the cabbage family, and arguably the easiest leafy green you can grow. They handle summer heat that bolts kale and shrug off hard frost that finishes most everything else. In fact a freeze makes them sweeter. One planting of these big, blue-green, open-leaved plants can crop for many months, giving you a near-endless supply of hearty greens from very little effort.

Heat-tolerant and frost-sweetened

Most brassicas are strictly cool-season, but collards span both ends — they take heat better than kale or broccoli and are among the most cold-hardy vegetables there are, surviving well into the low 20s°F and below. The cold is a feature: frost converts their starches to sugars, so collards picked after a freeze are noticeably sweeter and milder. That toughness means a spring planting can carry through summer, and a late-summer planting gives the best, sweetest crop of all, harvested through fall and winter in much of the country.

Easy from seed or transplant

Grow collards in full sun in rich, well-prepared soil. Direct-sow about a quarter to half an inch deep and thin, or set out transplants — either works, since collards are unfussy. Give them room: these get large, so space plants 18 to 24 inches apart so each can fan out. Keep them evenly watered and feed them through the season, since you're harvesting leaves continuously and the plant keeps replacing them. They're heavy feeders that reward decent soil with months of production.

Cut-and-come-again collards

Don't harvest the whole plant — collards are a classic cut-and-come-again crop. Pick the lower, outer leaves when they're big enough to use, working up the stem, and leave the growing rosette at the top to keep producing. Handled this way a single plant cranks out leaves for months on end, growing taller and almost palm-like as the season goes. Pick leaves while they're still tender rather than overgrown and leathery; older leaves are fine cooked long and slow.

Watch for cabbage worms

Collards get the same pests as the rest of the brassica family — chiefly cabbage worms and loopers, the velvety green caterpillars that chew holes in the leaves. A lightweight row cover keeps the white moths from laying eggs in the first place, and Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) handles any caterpillars that appear. Otherwise collards are remarkably trouble-free. Time your spring and fall plantings on the planting calendar.