oddball edibles: unusual vegetables to grow, with niki jabbour

I KNOW A LOT of gardeners, including myself, who might be called oddballs. But with help from Niki Jabbour, let’s be more polite and talk about oddball edibles instead: unusual and unexpected vegetables you can grow but might skip over in the catalogs—or maybe they’re not even in the catalogs you’re reading, but rate being tracked down.

Niki helped convince me of that, as part of my annual wintertime seed series. She is author of “The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener: How to Grow Your Own Food 365 Days a Year No Matter Where You Live,” and a contributor to the blog Savvy Gardening dot com. She also creates the award-winning radio program, The Weekend Gardener, heard throughout Eastern Canada.

Most relevant to this discussion, though: she grows a global range of vegetables and other edibles—from the world’s craziest cucumbers and edible gourds, to “Chinese artichokes” that aren’t artichokes at all, to oddball salad ingredients and even rice, quinoa and more.

Read along as you listen to the Jan. 2, 2107 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

q&a on oddball vegetables to grow, with niki jabbour

Q. Welcome back to A Way to Garden, Niki Jabbour. Happy seed-shopping season.

A. Isn’t this the best time of year? I love talking with fellow oddball gardeners. [Laughter.]

Q. I’m glad you embrace the oddness.

A. I do. It kind of what makes my garden interesting—all the interesting queer, quirky vegetables and edibles that I like to grow.

Q. A million years ago, when I first worked at “Martha Stewart Living” magazine as the garden editor, we invented these stories called glossaries—where you got to see every

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