They’re really common here in the north of Portugal - everybody with a cottage garden, which is everybody, has a grove of them. They’re the principal ingredient in caldo verde (a soup that is eaten pretty much daily, by pretty much everyone) up here - further south they use collard greens, but here it’s all kale. When we moved here we were gifted a few plants, and two and a bit years on they’re going strong, and we’ve propagated them to a few dozen - ours aren’t 12 feet tall, more like 6, but either way, it’s a common home crop, and is mostly human, rather than animal, fodder.
As to walking sticks, haven’t seen them used for that here, but people do use the dried stems as trellises for beans and whatnot.
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They’re really common here in the north of Portugal - everybody with a cottage garden, which is everybody, has a grove of them. They’re the principal ingredient in caldo verde (a soup that is eaten pretty much daily, by pretty much everyone) up here - further south they use collard greens, but here it’s all kale. When we moved here we were gifted a few plants, and two and a bit years on they’re going strong, and we’ve propagated them to a few dozen - ours aren’t 12 feet tall, more like 6, but either way, it’s a common home crop, and is mostly human, rather than animal, fodder.
As to walking sticks, haven’t seen them used for that here, but people do use the dried stems as trellises for beans and whatnot.