What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening podcast. Today we are joined again by the wonderful Nikki Jibor. She is an author of books that you probably already have and if you don't, you should probably get them, the year-round vegetable gardener, groundbreaking food gardens, and the one we're going to focus on today and pulse some inspiration and ideas from Veggie Garden Remix. As you might imagine from that title, it's rethinking some of the types of crops and varieties that you

grow to add a little bit more spice and variety to your garden. I know Nikki, this is something I love to do. I have in my seed collection instead of just having a root crops folder. I have specifically a radish folder that's overflowing. I have that many types of radishes. And so I thought maybe we could start out with some of your favorite unusual vegetables.

Oh my gosh, how much time do you have again Kevin? I can't remember an hour or two hours. We could go seven hours on this. Let's do that.

Oh, let's do it. You're listeners are like, no. I am obsessed with the crazy, weird vegetables, the global vegetables. Just the unusual varieties, different colors, different textures and flavors in the garden. I mean, this is my passion. That's the reason I wrote Veggie Garden Remix.

And it actually won the 2019 American Quarter Cultural Society Book Award, which was so crazy. I got to go to Washington DC and received the award, which is fantastic.

Because a lot of people are interested in this too. I didn't know if they would be, but a lot of people want to grow these cool vegetables. And thanks to a lot of seed catalogs, you can get a lot of these really neat varieties, like the radish you mentioned.

And I think, you know, for me, it started with a cucumber melon years ago. And you know, that kind of was kind of a craze two or three years ago. Everybody wanted to grow cucumber melons. They look, your listeners aren't familiar. They're the size of a grape. They're a relative of the cucumber.

And they have a kind of a cucumber-y lime kind of citrusy flavor. And they're so good. And each plant is very prolific. So I love the cucumber melons. But I also love ground cherries.

You know, I love those edible gourds, like luffa gourds, you know, ash gourds, all those little gourds you can eat when they're really quite immature, snake gourds. Oh my gosh, so good.

But there's just so much variety out there. I want to grow all of it every year to keep on experimenting in my garden.

Yeah, I do the same thing. And I probably bite out more than I can chew because, like, for example, I did Lufa this year. And I actually failed.

So my Lufa, I transplanted it three times because the one that I had direct sowed got ripped out by someone. I have no idea how that happened, but I woke up and it was ripped out.

So I transplanted it and they don't really like being transplanted. So mine just always kind of lingered on the edge of success.

Meanwhile, I had started this like Lufa growing challenge on Instagram and everyone's posting their incredible Lufa. And I'm just like crying in the corner.

I don't have a successful one, but you know, that's part of what it is. It's it's you're not going to win every single battle.

And I do remember like you were saying with the cucumber melons. To me, that was like the 2018 plant of the year.

Right.

Everyone was just going crazy about that. And then, okay, so we've got ground cherished cucumber melons, edible gourds.

Is there any sort of curveball plant that you think winter going into spring for 2020?

Someone could really add to their garden and get a lot of joy out of?

You know, it's funny, uh, lately, you know, I've been exploring more and more global vegetables.

You know, I love the different types of herbs out there too, but I've almost full circled back to varieties again.

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