Vegetables

Winter Melon The winter melon is available all year, but its peak season is in the summer. The name is a mystery. Bruce Cost's book "Asian Ingredients" explains that the name comes from mature green skin's "waxy,...

Butter Or Bibb Lettuce Butter Lettuce, most credit War of 1812 veteran Maj. John Bibb with creating what we call Bibb lettuce around 1870 in his greenhouse in Frankfort, Ky. The small, jade green lettuce was...

Chives The chive (allium schoenprasum) is the smallest of the alliums, the family that includes onions, scallions, leeks, garlic, and shallots. With a mild onion flavor (lighter than scallions or garlic chives), the plant is...

AeroGarden This indoor "smart" garden requires no growing skills. It is almost entirely automated. That said, AeroGarden costs about $150. That would buy a lot of fresh herbs over the course of three or four months, the...

Tomatillo The tomatillo looks like a tomato. It tastes like a tomato that's been sprinkled with lemon juice. Its name means "little tomato" in Spanish. But even though its monikers include the husk tomato, Mexican green...

Green Pumpkins Most likely, it has happened to us all. Your pumpkin vines are ending, and your fruits are not yet turning orange. Are they ripe? Can you eat green pumpkins? Is it possible to eat...

Quinault Strawberries Quinault strawberries are a cultivar capable of producing two harvests per annum: one in the spring, the early summer, and another in the fall. They are prolific during these two seasons but can also...

Rainbow Corn Carl Barnes, a half-Cherokee Oklahoma farmer, died in 2016. His life was full of joy. Barnes was determined to connect with his Native American roots, and so he grew a multicolored corn variety,...

Ground Mustard A common ingredient used in witchcraft recipes to make potions and elixirs was the eye of newt. This ancient ingredient was not actual newt eyeballs but a spice commonly known as a ground...

Cuban Oregano Little known in Southwest Florida, Cuban oregano has more aliases than a South Florida con artist. Masquerading as something it is not, this aromatic herb, Plectranthus amboinicus, isn't true oregano but a relative of...