A Closer Look At What We Eat

I love eating vegetables especially a fresh salad just picked minutes ago from our garden.  It’s not just tastier than store bought, but also makes me feel healthier physically and psychologically.  The leafy vegetables hardly have a chance to flower, but when the weather gets really hot and we’re stuck at work, then they start to ‘bolt.’  I do let some of them flower just to get seeds for next season.  That’s when the vegetables show their other beauty; not just the beautiful colors and textures of the leaves but delicate flowers in both color and design.

We love the the spicy and bitter taste of Arugula or Rocket (Eruca sativa).  Salad would be pretty bland without it, but that’s just my opinion.  Their beautiful pale yellowish/green flowers are edible.

Beautiful blue star of Borage (Borago officinalis) flowers are frequent by all type of bees.  They’re not just beautiful but they’re also edible; look lovely in salad.

I let some of the Broccoli raab (Brassica rapa) flowers bloom to harvest the seeds.  The bright canary yellow flowers add color to the vegetable garden and the bees love them too.

Chinese Broccoli or Chinese Kale (Brassica oleracea) is another leafy vegetable I grow.  The leaf is sweeter than other kales and is great for stir-frying or to put in noodle soups.

The garlic flower, aka ‘Scape’, has a milder taste than the garlic head.  I pick some of them when they’re small and tightly wrapped in tissue thin skin and use them in stir-fry vegetable dishes.  The photo above is a much more mature scape. These little bulbs are good for pickling or planting.  Although the garlic that grows from these little bulbs will not divide into cloves the first year.

Surprisingly the spicy Radish (Raphanus sativus) has these delicate pale pink flowers.  The flowers and seed pods are edible but, for me, it would serve no purpose to eat the seed pods since I let some of them flower to harvest the seeds.

Green Onion or Scallions (Allium cepa), some may call it bunching onion, is the one we eat the greens, not the bulbs.  The ones I grow have never set bulbs so I grow them from seeds that I collected the previous year.