Think you know your vegetables? Think again.
When I first started growing vegetables, I was shocked to learn some of these weird facts that I’m sharing with you today!
Plants are so interesting, and constantly surprising. There’s always more to learn!
Whether you’re a new gardener or just curious about where your favorite vegetables come from, these facts reveal just how weird and wonderful nature can be.
22 Weird Facts About Growing Vegetables
Here’s 22 weird and surprising facts about how vegetables grow. Read and impress your gardener friends with your newfound knowledge.
Vegetables That Are Actually Something Else
These veggies aren’t what they seem. You might be eating flower buds, plant stems, or even completely unrelated species.
Broccoli is a flower
What looks like a little green tree is actually an immature flower head that would burst into hundreds of little yellow flowers if left unharvested.
Celery is a bunch of crunchy stems
You’re actually munching on the petiole (the stalk that connects a leaf to a stem) when you eat celery.
Artichokes are actually thistle buds
If not harvested, an artichoke opens into a giant purple thistle flower. It’s actually quite pretty!
Potatoes are underground stems, not roots
Even though we dig them up from under the soil, potatoes are actually tubers, or swollen stems.
Sweet potatoes aren’t related to regular potatoes
Sweet potatoes belong to the morning glory family, not the nightshade family like regular potatoes. Their vines and flowers actually resemble morning glories.
Want to grow your own sweet potatoes and find out for yourself? Read my guide on growing your own sweet potatoes.
Kale, cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and kohlrabi are all the same species
All 6 are Brassica oleracea, selectively bred for different parts of the plant.
I actually let my kale flower sometimes and eat the immature buds that look and taste just like broccoli!
Corn is technically a giant grass
Botanically, corn is a grass, just like our green lawns… except it’s taller, tastier, and way more useful.
Swiss chard is just beet greens without the root bulb
Chard was bred for big leaves, beets for big roots. You can actually grow beet roots and eat the greens as you would chard!
Seeds and Baby Veggies
Sometimes the vegetable you’re eating is the plant’s seed… or an immature version of something else.
Green bell peppers are immature red (or yellow, orange, etc.) peppers
If you grow your own bell pepper plant, the peppers will start off green and then turn into another color when it’s sweet and ripe. This is a lot like tomatoes!
Green onions are just baby onions in disguise
All seed-grown bulbing onions look like green onions early on. If you harvest them early, then they are green onions.
However, some varieties never bulb up and are grown just for green onions. Learn more about growing onions in this guide.
Dried beans, peas, popcorn, and lentils are all seeds
Yes, you can actually put them in the ground, and they’ll grow into new plants. Try it with a bag of one of these from the grocery store!
Coriander is a cilantro seed
Same plant—two names. Cilantro is the leaves, and coriander is the dried seed. Again, buy coriander, plant it, and see for yourself!
Jalapeños ripen and change color
Most people eat them green, but left on the plant, they ripen and turn red (or orange/yellow in some varieties). They may even get sweeter and spicier.
Asparagus is a young plant shoot
The edible spears shoot up in spring, then grow into tall, feathery plants to store energy to regrow the next year.
Weird Ways Vegetables Grow
If you’ve never grown these vegetables, you may not have known that this can happen!
Cauliflower looks terrible with tan lines
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.
If they don’t get blanched, cauliflower will turn an unattractive shade of greenish brown.
Potatoes grow from potatoes
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 they aren’t really seeds.
Learn how to grow potatoes in my growing guide.
Zucchini can nearly double in size overnight
Under ideal growing conditions, zucchini fruits grow super fast! Miss a day and you’ll end up with a vegetable baseball bat.
Carrots won’t grow straight in rocky soil
They fork and twist when they hit underground obstacles. If you want to have a laugh, google “weird looking carrots.” Caution: some carrot photos may be NSFW!
Peanuts grow underground
After flowering above ground, the plant pushes its fertilized ovary into the soil, where the peanut matures. So weird!
Historical & Fun Facts
Because sometimes vegetables have a wild backstory too.
Carrots weren’t always orange
Ancient varieties were purple, yellow, and white. Orange carrots were selectively bred in 16th century Netherlands because they were sweeter and tastier. (source)
The “Three Sisters” garden method is companion planting at its finest
Corn, beans, and squash were grown together by Indigenous peoples of the Americas: corn for support, beans to fix nitrogen, and squash to shade the soil. (source)
Tomatoes were once thought to be poisonous and “loathsome”
Europeans feared them in the 1700s because they’re in the nightshade family.
Back then, tomatoes hadn’t been bred to be the massive slicers we know and love today. They actually looked a lot like deadly nightshade! People assumed they were poisonous because of the similarity. (source)
The More You Grow, the More You’ll Know
Vegetables are wacky and wild.
Understanding how they grow makes gardening way more fun. I look forward each year to trying a new vegetable variety or type that I’ve never grown before!
What surprised you most in this list?
Do you know any other weird vegetable facts?
Share them in the comments, or let me know if you’ve grown any of these wild plants yourself!
And don’t forget to share this with a friend who loves fun garden trivia.