This post is dedicated to weird vegetable facts that you won’t find out unless you grow your own.
Think you know your vegetables? Think again.
Some of gardening’s best lessons only come from doing it.
Like finding out what lettuce looks like when it bolts. Or discovering a carrot with legs.
Nobody tells you about these things before you start gardening. You just find out as you grow.
This post is dedicated to the things that surprised me when I first started learning about growing vegetables.
See if they surprise you, too.
Looking for something to make you smile? Have a laugh at these funny gardening quotes and memes.
Vegetables Aren’t Always What They Seem to Be
Here are some of my favorite surprises and curiosities that I love sharing with new gardeners and non-gardeners alike.
Green bell peppers are just unripe peppers.
This one gets people every time. In the grocery store, green, red, yellow, and orange bell p
Green bell peppers, red bell peppers, yellow bell peppers… they’re different colors, priced differently at the store, and shelved separately.
But grow your own, and you’ll find they’re the same pepper at different stages of ripeness.
Leave a green pepper on the plant long enough and it will change color. The mature color depends on the variety.
Some a red, some yellow or orange, and there’s even purple or chocolate brown peppers.
Green jalapeños ripen red.
Most people have only eaten them green, but a jalapeño will typically ripen to red (there are orange and yellow varieties, too).
The flavor changes too. Red jalapeños are a bit sweeter.
I use only red jalapenos in my red chili garlic sauce and it makes a big difference from green jalapeños.
Once you grow them, you’ll never think of the green ones the same way again.
Green onions and bulbing onions are the same thing (at first).
Plant a bulbing onion from seed and for weeks it will look just like a green onion.
Same thin green and white (or pink) stalks, same armpit smell, same everything.
The difference only becomes visible when the bulbing varieties start to, well, bulb. Until that moment, you genuinely cannot tell them apart by looking.
Two takeaways: first, if you harvest a bulbing onion early, you’ve got scallions.
Second, some varieties never bulb at all and are grown just for their tops. These are the seeds marketed as “green onions” specifically.
And while we’re talking about onions, did you know an onion bulb isn’t really a root?
It’s a stem surrounded by layers of fleshy leaves. The actual roots and thick white fibers below the fleshy stem.
This is why we don’t plant onions too deep if we want them to bulb up!
Experience this for yourself and find all the tips in my guide to growing onions from seed.
Asparagus spears are young plant shoots.
Yep, asparagus spears are young, immature plant shoots that first appear in spring.
Leave them alone (and you should if you hope to get another harvest next year!) and they’ll turn into tall feathery fronds that are great foliage for bouquets.
If you’ve just planted asparagus in your garden, remember not to eat those asparagus shoots in the first year. They need to frond out and grow stronger, more established roots first.
Once established, asparagus crowns can produce fresh, tender spears for twenty years or more.
It’s worth the wait!
Kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, and kohlrabi are all in the same family.
Kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, and kohlrabi are all Brassica oleracea, selectively bred to enhance different parts of the plant.
Kale for its leaves, cabbage and brussels sprouts for their leaf buds, broccoli and cauliflower for their flowers, and kohlrabi for its stem.
I actually let my kale flower sometimes and eat the immature buds that look and taste just like broccoli!
Sweet potatoes aren’t related to white potatoes at all
Sweet potatoes belong to the morning glory family (Ipomoea), not the nightshade family (Solanaceae) like regular potatoes.
Their vines and flowers actually resemble morning glories as you can see below.
Their common name, “sweet potatoes,” came from early European explorers mistaking them for the white potatoes they were used to seeing at home.
Want to grow your own sweet potatoes and find out for yourself? Read my guide on growing your own sweet potatoes.
Elephant garlic is not a true garlic.
Have you ever seen elephant garlic? It looks just like regular garlic, but it’s huge.
It has a mild flavor that’s slightly different than garlic, but is grown and cooked the same way.
But elephant garlic (Allium ampeloprasum var. ampeloprasum) is actually botanically a leek, not garlic.
Find out more about different kinds of garlic and which to grow in this post.
Weird Things That Happen While Vegetables Are Growing
Zucchini can nearly double in size overnight.
It’s not a myth. Under ideal growing conditions, zucchini fruits grow super fast! Miss a day and you’ll end up with a vegetable baseball bat.
The window between “perfect to harvest” and “too large and seedy to bother with” is maybe 24 hours.
Every experienced zucchini grower has found one hiding under a leaf that somehow became the size of a baseball bat.
Check your plants daily during peak season; this is not a drill!
Catfacing tomatoes have nothing to do with cats.
Catfacing looks super weird but the tomato is perfectly fine.
Catfacing is the name for deeply puckered, scarred, misshapen tomatoes that look absolutely nothing like a cat’s face.
This phenomenon happens when the flower was exposed to cold temperatures during development, which causes irregular growth as the fruit forms.
You’ll notice it first on the flower, which will be abnormally huge in comparison to the others. Then as the flower develops into fruit, it’ll look more like the photo below.
The tomato is completely edible. It’s just strange-looking. The more puckered and scarred it is though, the less edible those pockets are.
If you see a tomato developing with severe catfacing, it’s worth pulling off the young fruit so the plant can redirect energy to ripening heathier fruits.
Carrots can grow legs underground.
Ok, this isn’t really true, but carrots will fork and twist when they encounter an obstacle underground. Think rocks, compacted soil, or large sticks.
These cause carrots (which are a root, after all) to split and contort around whatever’s in their path.
The results can look bizarre and downright funny at times. Some carrots look like they’ve got legs. And more.
But the carrot is fine and still edible.
For the straightest carrots, make sure your soil is loose and rock-free down below. Or don’t worry too much about it and just enjoy laughing at whatever weird legs your carrots develop underground!
Cauliflower will turn tan if you don’t shade it from the sun.
To keep cauliflower heads perfectly white, growers “blanch” them by wrapping the plant’s outer leaves over the heads to shade them from the sun.
Skip this step and cauliflower turns an unappetizing shade of greenish-brown.
Can you imagine that as Crayola’s latest crayon color? Cauliflower brown.
The kids will be fighting over that crayon, I’m sure.
Corn needs wind to grow ears.
Corn is a unique vegetable to grow because it’s wind-pollinated. Pollen from the tassels has to land on the silks of neighboring plants and each strand corresponds to one kernel.
When corn is poorly pollinated, you’ll end up with sparsely filled cobs.
For this reason, plant corn in blocks, not rows.
Bolted lettuce looks like weeds.
When your lettuce begins to bolt, let it grow a flower stalk and set seed.
Once those flowers bloom, they’ll look a lot like a weed I’m sure you’ve seen before.
The first time I let my lettuce go to seed, I was surprised by how much it resembled dandelion, or more accurately that other dandelion look-a-like, sow thistle.
That’s because dandelions, sow thistles, and lettuce are all part of the same family: Asteraceae.
As the flowers mature, you’ll find the lettuce seeds make their own little fluffy white umbrellas (called the pappus) in order to catch the wind and spread around your garden, just like dandelions and sow thistles do.
However, this is one plant I wouldn’t mind having spreading itself around my garden!
Lettuce are very easy to save seeds from. Just wait until the flowers puff up into a little white pom pom and pull the seeds out.
Pretty neat, right?
Similarly, carrot flowers look just like Queen Anne’s Lace—which is either a weed or a pretty flower, depending on how you look at it!
To get carrots to bolt, you have to leave them in the ground over winter. The following spring, they will regrow and send up a flower stalk that you can then save the seeds from, as long as it hasn’t cross-pollinated with Queen Anne’s Lace.
It’s Not What You Think
Bolting is not always bad.
Bolting is when plants send up a flower stalk and start to go to seed. This is undesirable for plants where you’ll be eating the leaves, like lettuce or spinach.
But it bolting doesn’t always signal “the end” of a plant.
Take cilantro for instance. When cilantro bolts, it sets seed that ripens into a spice we call coriander. (Unless you’re British or Aussie, then it’s all the same the to you!)
Same plant—two names. Cilantro is the leaves, and coriander is the dried seed.
Then there are rat-tail radishes, which takes this idea even further. Rat-tail radish was bred specifically to bolt and produce long, slender seed pods—and that’s the part we’re meant to eat.
The root is left alone in the soil to fuel the plant to producing more seed pods, or rat-tails.
If you were to yank this plant out at first sign of bolting, you wouldn’t ever get to eat a radish pod.
And that would be a sad day.
Potatoes grow from potatoes.
Potatoes aren’t grown from seed. They’re grown from a mother potato.
You plant a small potato, or even just a chunk with “eyes,” and it sprouts into a whole new plant that is a clone of the parent plant. These planting potatoes often are called “seed potatoes” even though we all can tell they aren’t really seeds.
If developing potatoes get exposed to light near the soil surface, they’ll turn green. And green potatoes contain solanine, which is mildly toxic and tastes terrible.
The solution: Hill up soil around potato plants as they grow to keep the potatoes safe in the dark.
This is one of those things you might not know unless you try growing your own. Learn how to grow potatoes in my growing guide.
Tomatoes don’t mind being buried deep. Or sideways.
Common advice on planting seedlings is to bury them level with the soil in their nursery pots.
And that’s true of everything but tomatoes.
Tomatoes actually benefit from being buried deeply because the buried stem will grow roots.
The more roots a tomato plant has, the more nutrients and water it can collect. The roots also help anchor the plant more firmly in the soil.
So go ahead and dig a little deeper when you’re planting tomatoes.
But if you can’t dig deep, try burying a tomato sideways.
Yes, you read that right. Sideways.
Before planting, lay a tomato seedling, still in its pot, sideways on the ground. The stem will bend and curve upright towards the sky.
Plant the seedling sideways with the growing tip facing upright. The buried stem will grow roots.
And if you want the best-tasting tomatoes? Follow the tips in my post on growing tomatoes from seed.
I can’t guarantee they’ll look as odd as this cherry tomato below, but they’ll taste good!
Peppers are perennials.
In cooler climates, we grow pepper plants as annuals and expect them to live and die all in the same year.
But in tropical climates, Zone 9 and above, peppers can live year after year happily in the ground.
Some gardeners do successfully overwinter their peppers by digging up the plant before a hard frost, potting them up and storing them in the house until it’s safe to plant again.
Overwintering peppers gives the plant a head start the next year. It’ll produce earlier and more heavily.
Winter squash grows in the summer.
I think this needs to be said. Winter squash isn’t squash that grows in the winter.
Winter squash grows all summer long and the fruits are what last until winter, not the plant itself.
Some winter squash actually is very tasty as young, immature squash, much like summer squash or zucchini.
One example that I grow is the tromboncino squash. Picked young, it’s tender and juicy like zucchini. Left to mature on the vine, it develops a hard, tan rind much like butternut squash and can store well in the pantry through winter.
If you’re not getting zucchini, you might have to be the bee yourself.
Cucumber and squash produce separate male and female flowers. The male flower has a long, slender stem, while the female flower has a baby fruit attached to it.
You can see the male flower easily in the first photo. Below it to the right is an unopened female flower with a baby zucchini attached at the base.
These plants often produce male flowers first, and then the female flowers.
Bees typically get the pollinating job done for you, but if they aren’t, and you’re not getting any fruit, you might have to become the bee and do a little hand pollinating yourself.
There are a couple ways to do this. First, you can use a cotton swab or small paintbrush to dab a bit of the pollen from the male onto the inside of the female flower.
Or you can remove the petals of the male flower and rub its anther all over the female flower.
Yep. Just like that.
If you’d like to avoid this whole situation with your squash blossoms, then I suggest companion planting many pollinator-attracting blooms nearby.
Read my post on companion planting squash for better harvests.
Dahlia tubers are edible.
Yes, the fleshy roots of dahlia flowers are in fact, edible.
They can be enjoyed boiled, roasted or fried and are reputed to taste like a mix of jicama and celery.
Dahlia tubers are part of traditional Mexican cuisine, which makes sense because dahlias originated in Mexico and Central America.
It’s important to note that while you can eat any dahlia tuber, they may not all taste good. Many modern dahlias are bred for their gorgeous flowers, not for eating.
Have you ever eaten a dahlia tuber? Let me know what you thought of it in the comments below!
The More You Grow, the More You’ll Know
Vegetables are wacky and wild.
Understanding how they grow makes gardening way more fun. The more seasons you grow through, the more of these weird vegetable facts you’ll collect.
Each season brings an opportunity to learn something new and discover funny and weird facts about the common vegetables and plants growing in your garden.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve discovered in your garden? Leave a note in the comments!
And if you know someone who’s just starting out with their garden, share this with them.
For more real facts about vegetables, check out my page on vegetable gardening.