Uncommon Vegetables: Edible Garden Leaves
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Utilize more of your garden by harvesting uncommon vegetables. Commonly overlooked unusual edible plants include garlic scapes, radish seed pods, and other edible vegetable leaves.
by Wren Everett
Gardening is hard work. We battle bugs, weather, drought, and flood in valiant efforts to raise our own food. When it comes time to bring in a harvest, however, many gardeners leave half of their harvest to rot in the compost pile. It’s not that they’re needlessly throwing away whole carrots or tomatoes, however — they’re tossing plant parts that they don’t realize are actually edible. And in many cases, not just edible, but downright delicious.
When you’re a gardener, a “bonus” world of food is available to you, full of delectable delights that never see the inside of a grocery store shelf. Radish seed pods, garlic scapes, sweet potato leaves, and other ephemeral treats are not as easy to ship as their more well-known parts, so they are largely unknown as “food” to the general non-gardening public. Many new and old gardeners alike are ignorant of their potential, and don’t recognize them when they grow them, favoring only the taproots or fruit of their garden greats.
Thankfully, the only issue here is ignorance. I hope this article can show you where you might find some underutilized plant food and never miss out on your “bonus” harvest ever again. Keep an eye out for these unexpected edibles next time you take a stroll through your garden.
Garlic Scapes
If you grow hardneck garlic, you’re also growing a fantastic green vegetable. You may be aware that it’s necessary to cut off the flower stalk to grow great garlic. These wonderland-like spirals emerge with sudden abandon in spring, right when the summer’s heat starts to hint at the thermostat, and they happen to be more than tasty. As long as you cut them before the flower develops, they’re tender and chewy, and taste somewhat like garlicky green beans. Use them for stir fries, pesto, pasta, or raw and sliced thin on a Caesar salad.
Mulberry Leaves
Mulberries are a forager’s delight. These relatively small fruit trees seem to grow everywhere, from the sidewalk in the city to the edge of the path in the forest. While the berries are delicious, many have no idea that the leaves of the mulberry tree are edible too. When picked young (still light green and tender) they can be sliced thin and cooked like spinach, though they, admittedly, have more texture. At any age, however, the leaves can be used fresh or dried for a very pleasant caffeine-free tea.
Daikon Radish Seed Pods
Any radish seed pod is edible, but I list daikon radish in particular because the amount of seed pods these radishes produce borderlines on extraordinary. Even if you’re hoping to save seeds for next year, you may find that these will produce far, far beyond what you need. I never see that as a problem, though, because the immature seed pods are wonderful stir fried with ginger, garlic, and thinly slivered chilies.
Now, if you find that you really enjoy the crunchy, vibrant flavor of radish pods, it’s also worth knowing that there are some cultivars of radishes developed specifically for their seed pods. Called rat tail radishes, these plants have been selected to create pods that are nearly 6 inches long!
Tomato Leaves
Tomato leaves have long been maligned as dangerously toxic — a “fact” I believed for the majority of my life. Turns out, the hornworms are privy to one of the garden’s best-kept secrets: tomato leaves are delicious (used in moderation). When used as an herb, the leaves add a dense “tomatoey” flavor to sauces, soups, and stews. When minced finely, they make a bright flavor-punch to salads of all sorts. And when brewed into a tea, they taste surprisingly like a nice green tea.
Celery Leaves
We’re so used to eating the crunchy ribs of a celery plant that some may not realize that the leaves are also useful, full of that bright, celery flavor. They’re particularly useful in soup, where they can be chopped finely and swirled in for color and taste.
Carrot Leaves
Carrot leaves are typically lopped off before the sweet taproots are bundled down into the root cellar or refrigerator for storage. These strong-flavored, feathery beauties are very tasty, however, when added to soups, where they stay a bright, cheery green if not overcooked. I also enjoy using a food processor to turn carrot leaves into a tasty pesto — particularly appreciated when the basil has succumbed to frost.
Sweet Potato Leaves
The “potato” name might scare you off, thinking that the foliage of sweet potatoes are in the nightshade family and poisonous. Turns out, sweet potatoes are rather misnamed — they’re in the morning glory family, after all. Their leaves are produced in abundance through the hottest parts of summer, and are deliciously tender and mild when cooked. They’re often sold by the bunch in open-air markets through Asia — I have no idea why we ignore them like we do in the United States.
Cowpea Leaves
There’s so much to like about cowpeas/southern peas/black eyed peas, even if we can’t agree what to call them. In addition to being drought-tolerant and edible as a green bean or a dry bean, their leaves are tasty to boot. Young leaves are the most tender, but even fully grown leaves have an excellent flavor. They taste exactly like green beans, and are wonderful stir fried with garlic.
Brassica Plant Leaves
There are many cabbage family garden plants that we grow for their leaves, such as collard greens, kale, and, of course, cabbage. What many gardeners may not realize, however, is that all the greens of all cabbage family plants are edible, even if they’re not “officially” used as such. After all, botanically speaking, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collards, kohlrabi, and Brussels sprouts are all the same species of plant — B. oleracea — and all their leaves are edible and delicious. Additionally, those luxuriously leafy tops of your turnips and rutabaga are too good to waste. Even if you intend on harvesting the roots, you can snip a few leaves from each plant without hindering its growth. The leaves of all the plants listed here can be used exactly the same way you would kale.
As I hope you can see, most plants are truly generous, often offering us fruit, foliage, and seeds for food, and brightening up the landscape in the meantime. If extra harvests like this interest you, do your research and keep exploring. This list truly only scratches the surface of the extra goodies you can glean from your garden.
Tomato Edibility References
- Mcgee, H. (2009, July 29). Accused, Yes, but Probably Not a Killer. The New York Times.
- Moulton, M. (2022, July 5). 9 Uses for Tomato Leaves You Never Considered. Tomato Bible.
- Ly, L. (2024, February 23). Can You Eat Tomato Leaves? The Answer Will Surprise You. Garden Betty.
Wren Everett and her husband quit their teaching jobs in the city and moved back to the land on 12 acres in the Ozarks. There, they are learning to live as modern peasants: off-grid, as self-sufficient as possible, and quite happily.
Originally published in the March/April 2024 issue of Countryside and Small Stock Journal and regularly vetted for accuracy.
