Vegetable

Now here's a vegetable that you don't normally think of as a Northern crop. However, it grows well here, if you have a taste for it. My family aren't big on okra (Abelmoschus esculentus), calling it too slimy. The one way my daughter will eat it is roasted until crisp like a French fry. Then all the slime is gone. I also like it in stir-fries and soups, but that meal usually happens when I'm home alone. If you have a sunny, hot spot in your garden, you can grow okra. The plants are beautiful so they make an ideal edible landscape plant,...

One vegetable I use regularly in the kitchen is the onion (Allium cepa). That's why growing them for me is so important. You can grow a wide variety of onions in our cool climate, from sweet red onions to pungent yellow onions. The flavor of fresh onions is incomparable. Give them well-drained soil, water, sun, and cool temperatures and they will reward you with an abundant crop for salads and cooking. They're a garden staple. The key with growing onions is starting with the right variety. Onion varieties can be confusing because they are...

I must admit. When I first started growing parsnips (Petroselinum hortense), I wasn't impressed. They seemed to take forever to germinate, they grew slowly, and the carrot-shaped roots looked fine but didn't have any special flavor. Then I learned to let them get exposed to the cold and even overwinter in the garden then pick. The difference in flavor made it all worth while. These white roots turned sweet and flavorful making perfect additions to roasted root crop casseroles, mashed, or tossed in soups and stews. Although they're widely...

There are few vegetables more anticipated than peas (Pisum sativum) in spring. Fresh peas are seldom found in grocery stores, even in season, making them even more essential in the garden. While I grew up eating English peas (where you shell them), now we have snow peas and snap peas where you can eat the pods and all. It makes pea growing and eating even easier. Most of our pea crop ends up being eaten in the garden, because it's so easy to walk down the rows munching happily as you go. Beside eating them raw, peas are great sauteed,...

Learn about growing peppers including a podcast on the best sweet peppers for the North. Listen to podcast: podcast transcript Peppers (Capsicum annuum) can be hot or sweet, but freshly picked from the garden they always are delicious. Being Italian I have fond memories of my mother making sausage and sweet peppers for summer dinners. The long, sweet, banana-shaped peppers are what I grew up. As an adult I've grown sweet bell peppers, Italian frying peppers, and a whole range of hot peppers. With peppers, diversity is king. You can grow a...