What's your favorite "alternate" product of a garden plant?

As a beginner gardener, one of the things I've started to notice is how many plants can produce multiple edible/usable products. Some of these might be super obvious in hindsight, like green beans / dry beans, zucchini/squash, or grains/straw. Others, I'd never even thought of until I actually grew the plant in question. For example I had no idea that radish seed pods are basically spicy green beans, and now I want to try growing radishes specifically for the seed pods (and I've since learned that there's a "rat tail" variety which has been bred for this purpose, and I'd love to hear about any other such varieties).

What's your favorite thing to harvest from a plant, which isn't generally considered the main product of said plant?

The first one to come to mind is garlic scapes!

Hardneck varieties of garlic require cutting the flower stalk (scape) when they start curling. I really like making pesto with the scapes but I hear powdered dried scape is a wonderful seasoning as well.

I'm not sure if this counts as "garden plants", but raspberry and blackberry leaves are used for tea.

Mine--and my kids--favorite is brassica flowers! The kale, radish, and wild mustard plants make delicious flowers. We all munch on them every time we walk by a plant.

I was just talking about pickles with some family and had the epiphany that my favorite pickles always have grape leaves in them! They seem to help retain the ‘crunch’ of the cucumber through the pickling process.

You can also process them for recipes such as Dolmas or stuffed grape leaves.

Nicole Alderman wrote:Mine--and my kids--favorite is brassica flowers! The kale, radish, and wild mustard plants make delicious flowers. We all munch on them every time we walk by a plant.

The only brassicas that I've successfully gotten to flower and produce seed so far is radish (a "tillage" daikon variety that I planted in spring, not knowing what I was doing), and a single arugula plant that seems to be happier growing here than pretty much anything else I've planted. I have a couple of kale plants that managed to survive the bug onslaught in the spring, but they haven't bolted yet, so I haven't had a chance to taste the flowers. For the radishes, maybe a few years down the line I'll have enough flowers to consider it a crop, but until then eating the flowers seems like a waste, compared to waiting for the seed pods to form. Are the flowers really so tasty that it's not worth waiting? Or are you planting a whole lot more of them than me, so culling some percentage of flowers doesn't affect your seed production too much?

Timothy Norton wrote:I was just talking about pickles with some family and had the epiphany that my favorite pickles always have grape leaves in them! They seem to help retain the ‘crunch’ of the cucumber through the pickling process.

I've heard this about grape leaves, but also I've found black tea to be effective. According to the reading I've done, tannins are the active ingredient here. If that's the case, then acorns would be another good source of tannins which are much easier to come by in most climates in North America.

I've never managed to eat so many brassica flowers that the plant stops making them. My son had 2 red Russian kale plants in his garden from last year. He tried to eat all the flowers from them. We all ate flowers from it. Nevertheless, it is covered in a crazy amount of seeds. It just kept making more and more flowers. It's the third picture down below. We shook some seed pods from the previous year's kale on his garden bed...and it grew all the kale on the right.

My radishes also make a crazy amount of flowers. The second picture down below is a self-seeded radish plant in my daughter's garden. It made all those purple flowers.

The first picture is a patch of....purple mustard? black radish? maybe radishes crossed with daikon?...I eat flowers from it every day. It doesn't stop.

Now, granted, they might not like your microclimate as much as they like mine (zucchinis hate me and are sad little plants if they manage to survive). But, if your brassicas have survived and are flowering, you should be able to eat flowers and it'll keep making more flowers and more seeds. I don't think you could eat all the flowers if you tried.

At my kids' school, there's some kale plants that have self-seeded around the place. I love showing kids every year that they can eat them. Once they realize they can eat them, they don't stop! They are quite good. Radish flowers have a bit of radish strength to them, and aren't as widely enjoyed. Wild mustard flowers taste like horseradish. Bittercress (also called shotweed) is also quite good in the early spring. My kids say, "Why is it called bittercress? It's really yummy!"

My favorite alternative to a garden plant is food.

Raddish leaves for salads or sauteys, carrot tops for soup/stews.

The best one for me is figuring out which leaves of different root vegetables are edible. For example, I sometimes take the greens from onions and garlic and sauté that with some spices as a flavor base for some meals. In addition, beet greens are good as a substitute for spinach. Edible weeds are also cool as part of a salad. I wouldn't want to eat a giant bunch of dandelion greens, but a couple in a salad along with some other stuff (lettuce, arugula, purslane...) would be nice. One day, I want some chickens and other animals that I can feed some weeds/garden scraps as part of their feed and then return their (aged/composted) droppings as fertilizer.

Garlic "seeds"!
Someone at my community garden pulled their scapes so late the stems were hard and the flowers had set seed.
The seeds are tiny garlic bulbs.
I tried eating the stems, but ended up boiling them in oil(sounds wicked don't it?)
I used some of that oil to cook the flowers in.
I ended up with a jar filled with tiny garlic bulbs and garlic infused oil.

Seed pods from radish are easily as good as radish root and easier for me to produce. It's mostly what I'm selecting for these days.

Another one came to me today.

I have not made them, but you could get me to do just about anything for a well made tamale. An important part of the creation of tamales is the utilization of corn husks as a wrapper.

I believe dent corn husk is what is utilized usually?

It isn't a food, but garlic bulb stems/bases are great in a woodstove.

Radish greens are also edible, if you've never eaten them.

If it has to be edible? Young pea leaves. We eat them with pasta.

And I forgot! Salted basil stems. They are yummy and it doesnt' take that long. Got me to start salting basil. Takes a jar, basil leaves, salt. You end up with something that tastes like fresh basil + salt mid winter. I use the salt and the leaves.

It did indeed get me salting basil, which I do to this day. But I just found the recipe and it's pickled basil stems...Sorry!

we are big fans of radish/daikon leaf pickles and furikake.
also sweet potato leaves, there is a time in summer where that's my best "sauteed greens" option.

we grow an elephant-ear type plant that is edible (taiobá, Xanthosoma sagittifolium) and while the leaves are delish on their own, we often use them as "parchment paper" to bake bread on, or to wrap fish in for steaming, or to roll food in like nori for sushi (or, especially, omelets). They are frost sensitive and have now died back for the winter and I'm especially missing them right now!

Prickly Pear Cactus Pad as a alternative for green beans.

Broad bean tops as a lightly cooked green. So tender and bright and delicious! Superior to the pods, in my opinion.

Dandelion flowers.  Pop the heads right in your mouth as you walk along, and there's millions, and you don't ever have to plant them.
But best of all is the root. Roast it, grind it, and it's the only kind of coffee i can drink. Can not tolerate coffee beans without getting very ill, even decaf, which still hurts my stomach.  I might even like the taste of dandelion root better. And roast some hazelnuts right in there with them.

Elizabeth Elliott wrote:Dandelion flowers.  ...dandelion root ..

i haven't made beer in a while but the best i ever made was a total improv with dandelion roots and flowers, with some hoegaarden kind of spices (coriander seeds, orange peel, etc). I had been traveling for a month and came home to a garden totally overrun with dandelions, and decided this was The Chance to use them. wish i had measured and written it all down, because it was legendary!