This is a tip about thinking outside your regional food box. It’s too easy to get into a rut about growing what is normal for your area, and leaving it at that. Now if you’re lucky enough to live in a lush warm climate, where you can grow anything your heart desires, you might not feel the need to broaden those horizons. But for those of us living with more limitations, you can start to get creative.
Bok choy, lentils, and kiwi fruit may not be your usual garden fare, but they would be a fun and healthy addition to the usual North American line-up. We tend to make assumptions that “foreign foods” are also tropical, and that’s definitely not the case.
To use those mentioned above as examples, you can grow the New Zealand-native kiwi even in the colder climates you’d find in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula area. Just look for the hardy or super-hardy varieties, and they’ll survive bitterly cold winters. Lentils are a Mediterranean legume, yet grows splendidly all throughout the USA and even Canada.
Never even heard of bok choy? It’s a Chinese green that is somewhat like chard that produces green leaves and a celery-like stem. Versatile and delicious, it can give some great variety to your choice of garden greens. It will grow in the USA between Zones 4 and 7. Ever pass a kohlrabi in the store and wonder what it tastes like? It’s a very strange-looking vegetable that seems to be a cross between a turnip and possibly an octopus. It’s actually easy to grow and will produce a huge bulb for you in a fairly small space.
So whether it’s about exploring plants that you wouldn’t expect to grow in your climate, or just experimenting with foods from other cuisines, never limit your garden choices to the usual.
