The fall is the best time to grow food in Georgia. You get to ride out the late season heat and you’re rewarded with delicious veggies, while dealing with fewer pests and disease. As the weather cools, root veggies and greens get sweeter many summer favorites stick around. The best eats are planted now for October and November harvests.
You may be tempted to award the summer garden with the most attention, and adoration, and everyone declares their love for the perfect tomato. But in reality, summer veggies are too easy. They are picturesque and popular, but ultimately unsatisfying and superficial, similar to the popular cheerleader in a John Hughes movie.
Fall veggies, on the other hand, undersell themselves. Carrots, collards and beets are the Molly Ringwalds of the vegetable world. They are your best-friend veggie that you’ve ignored the whole time, only to discover they are exactly what you have been searching for. But you (sometimes literally) have to peel off the layers to discover what they’re truly about.
We know the regular cast of characters of the fall garden, and you may be tempted to think that a garden without big fruiting veggies is boring. But you’d be wrong. There are thousands of unique varieties and cultivars that will surprise you if you can give it a go. In assisting you in overcoming you’re summer bias, I’d like to introduce some overlooked stars that you might consider growing this year.
- Sweet Potatoes. This one is kind of cheating since you should’ve planted them already… and everyone knows about sweet potatoes. What you may not know if that the greens are delicious. one of my favorite dishes this time of year is sweet potato greens served like a hot spinach salad. Mix together some bacon grease, cider vinegar and maple syrup in a pan, heat until it steams, and then pour hot over the raw greens. You may enter briefly into another dimension. Be forewarned. It’s worth it to plant some now just for the greens
- Winter Radish. These are radishes that only grow in the fall. They come in all shapes and sizes. Many are familiar with the huge, mild tasting daikon radish, they can grow more than two feet long, and double as personal defense instruments. There is also a whole kaleidoscope of colors from a blue/purple-hearted variety called Bravo to the psychedelic tie dye pink of a watermelon radish. The added bonus is they are all easy to grow and lack the bitter sting of the smaller spring radishes.
- Celeriac. This might be the ugliest vegetable in existence. As you might guess from its namesake, it is related to celery and the leaves have a delicious pungent celery/parsley flavor that goes great in salad and soups. That’s where the comparison ends. When you pull the hairy, warty root mass out of the ground, you are vaguely reminded of a disinterred, zombie Medusa. Not something that you would normally be excited about eating, but don’t miss out. The peeled root is amazingly crispy, sweet, and fresh tasting but can also be used to great effect cooked in stews and soups. It has a shelf life of more than eight months, so you can grow a bunch and have them available nearly all year.
- Kohlrabi. If Celeriac is ugly, Kohlrabi is just weird. It looks like what you would get if you asked a science fiction writer from the 1950’s to draw a Martian’s favorite vegetable. You don’t see many things in nature that are purple, but kohlrabi doesn’t mind showing of, it’s used to being an outcast. It looks like a root, but is actually an ovoid swollen stem. Like I said, weird. Once you overlook its appearance, Kohlrabi is an incredibly diverse ingredient. It can be fried, roasted, eaten fresh, pureed, I’ve even had it marinated and grilled. It gets sweeter as the fall wears on, and it overwinters beautifully. If you don’t get around to harvesting it, the tender buds it puts out in spring are delectable.
- Chicory. I’ve saved the best for last. Chicories encompass a huge swath of varieties ranging from dandelion greens to radicchio to endive. They all have varying degrees of bitterness, something that turns many American palettes off. This is a shame, since there are so many ways to prepare them. Once you try an endive gratin, or a grilled head of Treviso radicchio with balsamic and Grano Pandano, you will be converted. A winter salad of sugarloaf chicory, radish, and apple is one of the best things that you can put in your mouth.
Once in your life you should try growing blanched Belgian endives. In a strange and counterintuitive series of practices, you let the plant grow, cut all of its leaves off, lift the root, store it in the fridge for a couple of weeks, replant the root in sand and keep it in complete darkness for a couple more weeks. And then, bam! You have it: delicious un-dead vampire food!
