Author urges gardeners to go beyond the usual vegetables
Author and garden expert Niki Jabbour doesn’t have anything against tomatoes.
In fact, they’re among her favorite home-grown crops.
But Jabbour — author of the new book "Veggie Remix: 224 Plants To Shake Up Your Garden and Add Variety, Flavor and Fun" — loves growing unusual plants and sharing that passion with fellow gardeners.
“My main goal is to encourage people to try something new,” she said by phone from her home in Nova Scotia.
“There’s a lot of diversity out there in seed catalogs.”
Take those tomatoes, for instance. Sure, the classic red orbs that you see in grocery stores are serviceable.
But her book suggests growing alternatives such as “the pea-size fruits of Mexico Midget, the weird clusters of Reisetomate, and the pale ivory tomatoes of Snow White.”
For an unusual relative of the tomato, she suggests ground cherry. The flavor “is comparable to pineapple with hints of cherry tomato and vanilla,” she writes.
Try ground cherries in salads or in desserts such as pie, cobbler or even sauce for ice cream.
Or perhaps you’ve heard of cucamelons, a once-obscure relative of cucumbers that are riding a wave of foodie popularity.
Jabbour writes that her family adores the versatile, inch-long fruits. They make delicious pickles, lunch-box treats or fresh-off-thevine morsels for hungry gardeners.
Her book continues with other tempting alternatives to well-known favorites, with sections such as:
• “Like potatoes? Try Jerusalem artichokes, groundnuts, Chinese artichokes, daylily tubers, dahlia tubers.”
• “Like parsnips? Try Hamburg parsley.”
• “Like summer squash? Try bottle gourds, snake Niki Jabbour Raised beds -- with their well-drained, uncompacted soil -- make an excellent home for all kinds of crops. The fruits of ground cherries are ripe when they fall from the plant.
“Veggie Remix: 224 Plants To Shake Up Your Garden and Add Variety, Flavor and Fun” (Storey, 231 pages, $19.95)
gourds, luffa gourds.”
One of her favorites is beans — her “gateway vegetable when I was a teenager,” she said.
Yellow wax beans are what got her started, she writes, and today she grows their exotic relatives such as yardlong beans and edamame Unusual greens include, from left, Green Wave mustard, Garnet Stem dandelion, Catalogna Special dandelion and Nozawana turnip green.
(young soybeans).
For salad lovers who are ready to move beyond basic lettuce, she recommends greens such as arugula, mizuna and mustard.
“They’re super-easy and fast-growing,” she said. Fancy restaurants serve salads featuring such greens and wow their guests, she said — and with minimal effort, you can, too.
Whatever you decide to grow, “My best advice for new gardeners is to start small,” she said. “If you go too big too quickly, it can be more of a chore.”
Begin with a few containers or one raised bed, she suggested.
“You definitely want it to be something you enjoy.”
Compost and lots of sun are ingredients that
almost all veggies appreciate, she added.
Now that she’s a successful gardener and author with several books under her belt, what advice would she give her younger self if she could magically tiptoe back in time, I wondered.
Build raised beds, she answered. Such structures warm faster in spring, offer excellent drainage, encourage efficient use of space and allow the gardener to control the growing medium.
Because they’re raised above the ground, they also make it easier to pick your delicious harvest.