20 Heirloom vegetables

20 Heirloom vegetables

After my previous fruit lists I have had some requests for a vegetable list, the research of which led me to a shocking discovery. In my plight to discover if I could use tomatoes for this list, I discovered that half the vegetables that I thought where vegetables, aren’t technically vegetables at all, but rather fruit. Technically speaking a fruit grows from the ovary of the flower and contains seeds. That means that tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, peas, beans, courgettes and peppers are all technically fruit and not vegetables. On a technical level a vegetable is any edible part of a plant excluding the fruits, so stems, roots, leaves and flowers. For this list I have decided to go with the less technical classification of – If you generally cook it, it is a vegetable, tomatoes included.
Heirloom vegetables are vegetables that are not cultivated for public consumption, or sold to the public. Laws in certain countries like the UK, prohibit the sale of any vegetables not on a national list. These plants have instead been handed down by families and cultures as the name suggests, and their species have been carried on for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. This just means that there are literally thousands of varieties of vegetables that you have probably never even thought existed. For instance, did you know that the oldest records of carrots (pre 900AD) is from Afghanistan and was anything but orange? In fact it is believed that orange carrots were created from a mutation by the Dutch to honor their royal family in the 1700s. In this list we will take a look at some of these strange, lost vegetables, all of whose seeds can be purchased online. I have not done the list in any special order, as there is really no choosing which is better when it comes to such awesome vegetables.

1. Loonar White Carrots
2. Banana Legs Tomato
3. Purple Majesty Potato
4. Peter Pepper
5. Giant Red Celery
6. Purple Italian Globe Artichoke 
7. Blue Hopi Corn
8. White Detroit Beetroot  
9. White Scallop Squash
10. Gold Rush Zucchini
11. White Star Sprouting Broccoli
12. Violetta Italia Cauliflower
13. Japanese White Egg Eggplant
14. Precoce d’Argenteuil Asparagus
15. Sweet Chocolate Peppers
16. Weebee Little Pumpkins
17. Watermelon Radish
18. Dragon Tongue Bush Bean
19. Magenta Sunset Chard
20. Forbidden Rice