Grow something different!

It is a weekly and wonderful ritual for Niki Jabbour — harvesting from her garden during the season and heading to the in-law’s home with her husband and two teenage children in tow for a family meal. The connection between family and gardening isn’t lost on anyone who spends time planting and can play an important role in what’s grown in our gardens.
“It’s tradition,” she says of the weekend get-together, “and it’s a beautiful way to celebrate food and family together.”

It was her mother-in-law, Noha, who helped inspire the Canadian author and gardening personality to search for new and interesting varieties to grow. Jabbour had a trellis covered in snake gourds growing as an ornamental, and Noha recognized them as cucuzza, a popular edible vegetable from her small native Lebanese village.

“I started thinking, what else could I grow for her?” she wondered. “I went down this rabbit hole of global vegetables.”

The garden evolved from the crops planted for Noha into a garden also filled with Japanese, Mexican and Indian veggies to fulfill Jabbour’s love for diverse cuisine. The garden adventure spawned an amazing new book, “Veggie Garden Remix, 224 New Plants to Shake Up Your Garden and Add Variety, Flavor and Fun.”

“For the past 10 years I’ve been exploring so many types of global and unusual crops,” she says.

Jabbour encourages gardeners to stretch when it comes to choosing varieties. “That could mean trying a new variety of tomato or cucumbers,” says Jabbour, “or you can go off the beaten path and try some really unique things.”

It’s been a hit with her family, friends and neighbors who all enjoy sampling these different foods. Her most popular unusual vegetables are cucamelons.

“They look like a watermelon the size of a grape, but they have that cucumber-citrus flavor,” she says. “They are crunchy, delicious and we just love to eat them.”

From the eight to 10 plants she grows, there are thousands of the little fruits harvested — and most are enjoyed in the garden. They are easy to grow, too; she starts seeds four to six weeks before the last frost of the season in four-inch pots. The vining plants are placed in the full sun and will take off as soon as the soil warms up, eventually reaching 10 feet.

“I try to channel that growth up something, whether that’s a trellis, a vine or a tunnel,” says Jabbour. “It lets me enjoy a larger harvest when I can grow them vertically and not have things sprawling all over the ground.”

She’s growing vegetables year round in her Nova Scotia garden and focuses on greens as cool weather crops. Lettuce, spinach and others are staples, but there are some fascinating and productive, but lesser known, crops too.

“Tokyo beckona looks like ‘Black Seeded Simpson’ lettuce, but it’s a loose leaf type of Chinese cabbage,” she says. It’s very cold tolerant, and the leaves are mild tasting. When it does eventually go to seed in warm weather, the flower bud clusters and yellow flowers are tasty and often used as great additions to a salad.

Magenta spreen is a beautiful ornamental edible related to quinoa. “The startling thing about magenta spreen is the fact that every bud cluster has this magenta, hot pink coating. It’s very beautiful. My daughter used to call it the magic sparkle plant; she would take those little buds of hot pink and rub them on her cheek as sparkles.”

It tastes like spinach, loves the heat, is very productive and grows to five feet tall.

Even though the 45-year-old has ramped up her unusual plantings in the last decade, she’s always had a penchant for growing something a little different. As a teenager she found ‘Lemon’ cucumber in a seed catalog and has grown it every year since.

“Everybody in my family was shocked,” she says of the unique fruit. “I did not know that cucumbers could be round or pale yellow. There’s such diversity out there through the seed catalogs, so it’s really fun to experiment in the garden.”

Ground cherries are another favorite at her house. They are about the size of a small cherry tomato only with a papery husk like a tomatillo. The taste has been described as pineapple-like with a little cherry tomato and vanilla flavors. Plants produce hundreds of the fruit, which are ripe when they fall off the plant, hence the name.

When Jabbour shows up for the weekly family feast with a box of them, there’s one person who’s most excited. Noha loves the ground cherries that her daughter-in-law brings, saying “these are for me only,” Jabbour says laughing.

Another of the original Lebanese crops she started growing is chickpeas. They aren’t dried as we find them in the stores, but are harvested right off the plant to eat, similar to a shell pea. “They are fresh, green and they taste like summer,” she says of the traditional food.
Since she was 15, Jabbour has explored the connection between unusual vegetables and the people she loves the most. It’s a lifetime of sharing which has brought her happiness by spreading the word.

“It’s what keeps the fun in gardening, and it really engages neighbors, friends and family. It gets them into growing gardens themselves. It think it’s a gateway into getting people into gardening, all these fun unique things to grow.”

Doug Oster is editor of Everybody Gardens, a website operated by 535Media, LLC. Reach him at 412-965-3278 or doster@535mediallc.com. See other stories, videos, blogs, tips and more at everybodygardens.com.

Details: Niki Jabbour, savvygardening.com.

Cucuzzi seeds are available from Southern Exposure Seed, southernexposure.com or 540- 894-9480.
Cucamelon, magenta spreen, Tokyo beckona, ground cherries and chick peas are available from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, johnnyseeds.com or 877-564-6697.