As a kid on our vegetable farm, I dreaded the fall vegetable harvest. The rows seemed endless and the weather was always either too wet and cold, or too hot and dusty.
To break the tedium, I would collect "weirdo" vegetables - each with a strange or quirky growth habit - and line them up in the barn. While they were too odd to sell, they kept me entertained.
The thrill of gathering vegetable oddities slowly gave way to finding explanations for the abnormal growth. If you want to know why the heck some vegetables look the way they do, here is a bit of a primer on vegetable weirdness.
Smooth tubers sometimes suddenly initiate small, random nodules, creating an intriguing array of appendages. These are often the result of a period of drought, quickly followed by a period of abundant soil moisture.
The potatoes are fine to eat, but the knobs break off rather easily, rendering them more prone to rotting in storage. Russet Burbank a potato variety common to gardens across the Prairies is the most prone to becoming knobby. Keep your soil consistently moist during tuber formation for nice, smooth potatoes.
Occasionally, otherwise smooth carrot roots develop a profusion of fine, white hairs, usually the result of too much soil nitrogen from over-ap-plication of manures or rich composts. So cut back on the extra-rich carrot food; moderate amounts will produce big, crunchy, juicy taproots.
While some vegetables have excess hair problems, others suffer from baldness.
Plants with bald head lack a growing tip, which results in developing a few leaves, but little more. As a result, affected plants fail to grow to maturity. Roughly handled seeds can lead to cracked or split seed coats, which can damage tiny, sensitive grow-ing points within the seed and lead to this baldness.
Vegetables such as cabbage, cauliflower and string beans are quite prone to bald head and since headless cabbage isn't very popular, be gentle with your seeds and watch those growing points.
INTERNAL SEED SPROUTING OF TOMATOES
Tomatoes occasionally suffer from this oddity, in which tiny tomato seedlings push through the skin of a ripe to-mato fruit in Chia Pet-like fashion.
Normally, the gel-like stuff surrounding the tomato seeds inhibits seed germin-ation within the fruit, but sometimes things go awry with the gel and the seeds spontaneously germinate, usually in the fall..
Sometimes, cucumber plants will develop crescent-shaped fruit with a second cucumber growing on the curved inner surface of the first. The resulting oddity is a strange union into conjoined twins. Certain varieties are more prone to this type of fusion than others and the process begins shortly after pollination because of a con-nection of fruit ovaries. The fruit is perfectly fine to eat, but it is a little difficult to squeeze into a pickle jar.
The days of gathering up weird-looking vegetables are long gone for me. Now, I get a kick out of seeing the enjoyment my kids get from finding the occasional odd-ball in our small vegetable patch. Weird-looking vegetables and those accompany-ing weird-looking facial expressions make gardening that much more fun.
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