Top 3 Reasons to Grow Something Weird!

Have you ever seen a picture of a plant online or in a book and thought – “what is that?” Or, heard the name of a plant like a Snake Bean, a Black Tomato, or a Purple Snap Pea and thought – “I’ve never heard of something like that!”

One of the great things about gardening is you can try to grow whatever you want. Here are my top three reasons to grow something weird in your garden this year.

#1 – It’s fun to grow weird things!

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t grow red tomatoes and cucumbers and lettuce and spinach and all the plants you know and love. In fact, I highly encourage you to grow things you love, because you’ll have the most energy and be most excited to celebrate your first harvest of your favorite foods. However, once you’ve got those basics down, and you’ve allotted the necessary space in your garden for your favorites, you can carve out a space for something new.

Growing the same vegetables year after year can get boring after a while. Don’t be afraid to try something new. It will give you different challenges and open up new opportunities. And, once you’ve tried all the things you think you might like, don’t be afraid to try something that sounds a little weird. Sometimes the weirdest sounding things are the most fun to grow and eat!

#2 – Kids love to try new things

My kids are especially excited to try growing weird sounding fruits, vegetables, and flowers in their garden patches. Even things that I know they haven’t liked to eat in the past. If it has a cool name, or the picture is cool, they want to try it. Heirloom seeds with funny names or interesting stories about where they came from are special favorites.

Adult gardeners could learn something from the enthusiasm and open-mindedness kids bring to their garden adventure. I’ve also found that my kids are much more willing to eat vegetables that they have grown themselves, even if they haven’t wanted to try them in the past. It’s good to expand our horizons every now and then and try something new. Who knows, you might just like it this time.

#3 – You might find a new favorite

Sometimes when we grow a new garden plant, we have to come up with new ways to eat or preserve it. One year we tried a bunch of different varieties of radishes. They were all different shapes, sizes and colors. But, they all got ripe at about the same time and we had way too many to eat fresh. Now, radishes don’t keep that long in the fridge (about a week or so), and if you leave them in the ground, they get hard and woody. So, we had to find another way to preserve our harvest. I found a recipe online for radish quick pickles.

Basically you just clean the radishes, cut off the leaves and root and put them in a jar of vinegar and salt water in the fridge. They kept that way for over a month and the vinegar evens out the sharp radish flavor to a nice pickle. They were great sliced up on salads. Also – fun fact – the red radish skins bleach to white in the vinegar, turning the juice in the jar red, and the white radish centers pink.

We’ve also found some salad greens that we didn’t typically buy at the store, that have become family favorites. I had heard of arugula before, and probably had it in salad, but didn’t know how to differentiate it from other salad greens until I grew it myself. Now I love that sharp flavor in a fresh salad. You only need a few leaves to make a big flavor difference.

So many things to try, and new varieties are being offered all the time. Don’t be afraid to get out there and grow something weird!