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IN THE depths of the UK winter, most of my vegetable beds are bare, except for my star performer: purple sprouting broccoli. It is in the middle of its fabulous January growth spurt.

This giant of a broccoli plant is arguably the queen of the brassica family of vegetables. Also known as winter sprouting broccoli, it is very tolerant of cold, and requires several weeks of cold weather before it puts forth its flower buds and becomes ready to harvest.

Unlike ordinary broccoli plants, which have a single large head and are usually harvested by autumn, purple sprouting broccoli has multiple small florets as side shoots from the main one. The chief eating pleasure, however, comes from the stalk, which is sweet and delicious after the cold drives its cells to convert their starch to sugar, lowering their freezing point.

The brassica family is diverse and eaten all over the world. Just one species, Brassica oleracea, includes two kinds of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale, kohlrabi and more, as people have bred it for the development of different traits.

B. oleracea鈥�s origins have long been debated, but last year an international collaboration .

The researchers found that the ancestor was most likely to be a close relative of a plant called Brassica cretica, a gangly weed with cabbage-like leaves that grows on the rocky shores of Greece, Turkey and Lebanon. The shoots of this wild plant are edible.

Similar-looking plants found on the coasts of the UK and other parts of western Europe turned out to be 鈥渆scapees鈥� that reverted in the wild to their ancestral forms 鈥� a sort of 鈥渇eral cabbage鈥�, says , now at the University of Florida, who was involved in the work.

After sowing purple sprouting broccoli in a small pot, you will need about 1 square metre of land per plant. You need to cover it with netting to keep pests away 鈥� especially butterflies such as the large white (Pieris brassicae). You can buy hoops to hold up a netting tunnel over the plants, but I make my own by sticking lengths of thin cane into the ground along the sides and using sections of old hosepipe to connect the two sides.

Apart from scattering a few slug pellets when the young plants are put in the ground, and watering in the summer, that is about all the attention they need. Crops that produce their harvest in summer typically need more watering and fussing over, but there is more rain and fewer slugs in winter.

Purple sprouting broccoli is a versatile cooking ingredient, but my favourite approach is to briefly microwave it before adding it to a hot wok with garlicky oil, then sprinkling with toasted sesame seeds.

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