Yes, Sarah Kleeger knows: Kale is not exactly making headlines these days. Not anymore.

“Kale is so 2010, or whenever,” she was saying the other day by phone, from Sweet Home, Ore., as she walked through her kitchen garden, describing and sampling this green and that, a sort of virtual show-and-tell and tasting.

Lest she be misunderstood, though, she quickly added: “But I’m definitely not bored with kale, and still celebrate it.”

No matter how familiar or even generic kale has become, Ms. Kleeger would not be without it. It is an essential at her home, and among the nearly 600 vegetables, grains, herbs and flowers in the Adaptive Seeds catalog that she founded in 2009 with her partner, Andrew Still.