Heirloom Vegetables

While I have some free time I thought I would teach you something you might not know. If you do know about heirloom vegetables - I'm glad you do!

So what are heirloom vegetables? According to wikipedia, heirloom plants are old cultivars that are "still maintained by gardeners and farmers particularly in isolated or ethnic communities". They're basically all the different kinds of vegetables that we don't see any more in big supermarket chains.

You might be wondering what types of vegetables these are? Well have a look at some of the pictures below. This isn't GM foods - it's natures way of diversifying it's plants to protect itself and give us more beautiful things to look at.

You may have never known that carrots weren't always orange. They were first found in Iran and Afghanistan areas and were white in colour. There were also purple, red and yellow varieties.

And it's not only carrots that come in all shapes and sizes. You can find almost any kind of vegetable that is different from what you would normally see. 

I have decided that I want to grow some of these when the winter ends, so in the meantime, I get to decide on what I would like to grow. I'm thinking some tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplants would be a great start.

I'm really excited to try and grow some of the heirloom corn available, not so much to eat it - but more so because of the colours available. I will probably order the strawberry popcorn variety, named because it looks like little strawberries when it's still on the cob. I think that it would very interesting in salads too!

So I hope that I managed to show you something new that you never knew about before today. Keep an eye out here in the summer if you want to check on the progress of my vegetable garden. I will also be posting helpful tips and hints for gardening.