25+ rare and unusual edible plants to grow in your garden
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In our opinion, if you’re going to garden, at least some of the things you grow should be rare and unusual edible plants you can’t buy at a grocery store or farmers market. Also, by experimentally growing a few new things each season that you’ve never eaten before, you’re very likely to discover new favorites for the future.
Over the years, we’ve grown hundreds of unusual edible plants in our Zone 8a garden on the outskirts of Greenville, SC. (We were in Zone 7b until the USDA update in 2023.)
Below is a list of some of our favorite rare and unusual edible plants that you might also want to consider growing if you live in a temperate climate zone like we do:
1. Winged bean
Description: Winged beans are a tropical perennial bean that can be grown as an annual plant in cooler climates (Zones 9 and below). Every part of the plant is edible: flowers, leaves, pods, and even the underground tubers it forms, which can be eaten like potatoes. The mature bean seeds also make a good dry bean.
The pods (beans) are visually unique, featuring four ruffled ridges. They have a crunchy texture and taste like a cross between peas and asparagus. They’re awesome sliced in a stir fry.
2. Peruvian ground apple, aka yacon
Description: Peruvian ground apples aren’t a fruit, they’re a root crop. (A storage root, to be botanically precise.) After a short ~2 week post-harvest curing period, they have a wonderfully sweet flavor and crisp texture.
We slice and dehydrate our Peruvian ground apple roots for use throughout the year. They have unique health benefits and are a powerful prebiotic.
Their sweetness comes from fructooligosaccharides (FOS), a type of sugar that acts as prebiotic fiber. That’s why you’ll see yacon syrup sold in health food stores as a low calorie sugar-alternative that can help people with high LDL cholesterol or diabetes.
Read more: How to propagate and grow Peruvian ground apples
3. Celtuce
Description: Celtuce is not your momma’s lettuce. Technically, you can eat the leaves, but it’s better to leave them on the plant so they can pump energy into the best part: the crunchy thickened stalk section.
Once you cut off the fibrous skin, celtuce stalks have the crunch of celery and a sweet taste with mild notes of nuts and lettuce. Quite delicious!
Learn more: How to grow and eat celtuce, an ancient now-trending veggie
4. American groundnuts
Description: American groundnuts are quite possibly our favorite root crop. We love making the tubers into a mash, which tastes like a combination of boiled peanuts and mashed potatoes.
An interesting bit of history: American groundnuts are what kept the Pilgrims alive during their first harsh winter here. They’re a low-maintenance, perennial legume that also produces edible flowers and bean pods, but the tubers are definitely the best part of the plant for eating – once you learn how to use them.
Read more:
- How to grow and use American groundnuts
- Recipe: American groundnut mash with rosemary brown butter
- Recipe: American groundnut and maitake mushroom chowder
5. Cucamelon
Description: Cucamelons, aka Mexican sour gherkins, are small mounding vines that produce large quantities of tiny, lemon-flavored cucumbers. We can’t speak for kids everywhere, but our son LOVES finding and eating them.
Here in Zone 8a, our cucamelons come back from seed in the same spot each year, so we don’t have to save seed or start new plants.
6. Ground cherries
Description: Ground cherries are a husked nightshade fruit (tomato and tomatillo relative) that tastes like a cross between pineapples and tomatoes. They’re near the top of the list of favorite summer fruits in our household.
If you’re disciplined enough not to immediately eat them all in your garden, they do make for some amazing recipes.
Read more:
- Why and how to grow ground cherries in your next summer garden
- Recipe: Ground cherry preserves
- Recipe: Ground cherry pecan-oat crumble (gluten-free)
- Recipe: Panna cotta with ground cherry bourbon sauce
7. Golden raspberries
Description: Golden raspberries are sometimes described as the “champagne of raspberries,” a nickname which we will not dispute. We grow red, black, and golden raspberries, and we love them all. However, if we had to choose a favorite, it would be goldens.
Read more:
- 6 tips for growing organic blackberries and raspberries in the Southeast
- Recipe: Golden raspberry, elderflower, and honey sparkling cordial
8. Stridolo
Description: Stridolo is a rare Italian perennial vegetable that produces delicious early-season shoots. The taste is similar to pea greens with a touch of bitter. When cooked, the bitter dissipates.
From late spring though summer, they prolifically produce small, white balloon-shaped flowers that are not only pollinator magnets, but a delicious edible flower as well. For best flavor, pick the flowers early in the day when the nectaries are still full.
Read more:
- Stridolo (Silene vulgaris): How to grow and eat this rare Italian veggie
- Recipe: Gourmet soft-scrambled eggs with stridolo and stinging nettle
9. Purple kohlrabi
Description: If an apple and broccoli had a love child, it would be kohlrabi. Or at least that describes the shape, texture, and flavor of kohlrabi.
Some people mistakenly call kohlrabi a “root crop,” but it’s actually the above-ground, swollen meristem of a Brassica oleracea cultivar, as you can see in the picture above.
We prefer purple to green kohlrabi so we can get extra anthocyanins in the cool months. If you want a green kohlrabi, we’d suggest the cultivar ‘Superschmelz,’ both because it’s fun to say and because it produces giant kohlrabis.
10. Native passionfruit
Description: Some of my earliest childhood memories are eating wild native passion fruit (Passiflora incarnata), so it’s no wonder that The Tyrant and I also enjoy growing and foraging it today.
Eat the fruit unripe, and it’s rather disappointing. Eat it ripe, and it’s a tropical-flavored delight. The easiest way to tell when native passionfruit is ripe is when it drops off the plant onto the ground on its own.
Read more:
- Native passion fruit: How to grow, forage, and eat
- Recipe: Wild fermented passionfruit cordial
- Recipe: Passionfruit and pawpaw sorbet
11. Yellow wonder strawberries
Description: Yellow wonder strawberries, aka yellow Alpine strawberries, taste more like tropical fruit punch than standard strawberries. The fruit grows on compact plants that produce loads of small fruit.
Unlike other strawberries we grow, the plants don’t produce runners/stolons. You’ll want to replace the plants every few years as the older ones lose productivity. They’ll grow in Zones 3-9.
12. American beautyberry
Description: American beautyberries aren’t a good fresh eating berry, but they make a great flavoring (reminiscent of Chinese five spice) and add vibrant color to a wide range of recipes. Note that Asian beautyberries are a common invasive plant used in landscapes. Asian beautyberries are sweeter but don’t offer quite the same flavor nuance as native American beautyberries.
Read more:
- How to use American beautyberries as food and insect repellent (with recipes)
- Recipe: Chestnut flower crepes with beautyberry whipped cream
13. Black Incan maize
Description: We’ve grown some strikingly beautiful maize varieties over the years, such as the Instagram star ‘Glass Gem.’ A lesser known visual stunner is Black Incan corn. Other common names for this corn variety include Maize Morado or Peruvian purple corn.
You can eat Black Incan corn as a sweet corn when it’s still immature and in its milk phase, which is characterized by the kernels being juicy and not yet being fully black/purple in color. However, once it’s mature, the kernels/cobs need to be cooked or fermented prior to consumption.
The variety’s deep purple color is owing to high levels of anthocyanins, the antioxidants which also give blueberries and blackberries their color.
Read more: Recipe: How to make chicha morada from black Incan corn
14. Yuzu
Description: We’re citrus junkies who grow over a dozen varieties of citrus in huge pots that we have to haul in and out of a heated garage all winter long using a custom-built pot moving device. Yes, we’re that dedicated to getting fresh organic citrus.
Each variety of citrus has differing degrees of cold tolerance. By far the *hardiest citrus we know of and grow is yuzu, which we’ve had growing in-ground for over 5 years now. Yuzu tastes like a delicious cross between a lemon and grapefruit; both the peels and juice make amazing drinks and teas.
Yuzu trees will drop all of their leaves when temps go into the mid-low teens, but will bounce right back as soon as the weather begins warming in late winter. Our yuzu tree has even survived multiple nights in the single digits.
(*Technically, trifoliate orange is more cold-hardy than yuzu, but its fruit is terrible. Good rootstock though!)
Read more: How to grow yuzu citrus in cooler climates
15. Che fruit
Description: Che fruit aka Mandarin melon berry is quite an oddball, literally. This mulberry relative is a large thorny tree that produces fruit with a berry-like appearance and a taste like a cross between watermelons and figs.
We purchased a self-fertile che variety from a vendor at a farmers market that took about 7 years to start producing fruit. During Hurricane Helene, a giant white oak tree smashed our che tree to pieces, but it’s coming back strong!
If you have limited space, definitely get a self-fertile che variety. Also, prune the trees aggressively to keep the branches low enough to allow for harvesting – and wear thick gloves because they have very large thorns!
16. Goumi berry
Description: Our self-fertile goumi bush might be the most productive fruiting plant in our garden. It’s also an early producer, with fruits ripening in early May.
Goumi fruit should be picked when very ripe for best flavor (deep red and soft). The flavor is like a tangy, astringent cherry. The soft fibrous seeds can be eaten along with the fruit.
Other than pruning, our goumi requires zero maintenance. It even produces its own nitrogen fertilizer with the help of specialist bacteria via the process of nitrogen fixation, thus converting atmospheric nitrogen into a bioavailable form.
Read more: How to grow and use goumi berries
17. Pineapple guava
Description: Pineapple guavas, aka feijoas, aren’t true guavas, they’re a South American plant in the myrtle family. The fruit tastes like a cross between pineapples and passion fruit.
To eat, cut a fruit in half and scrape out the insides with a spoon. (The skin is edible, but not great.)
The fruits ripen late, from September through October, falling on the ground when they’re ready. The petals might be the best edible flower we know of, with a silky texture and a flavor reminiscent of cotton candy. You can carefully remove petals without affecting fruit set.
Read more:
18. Roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa)
Description: A gorgeous hibiscus plant that produces edible leaves and flowers? Meet Hibiscus sabdariffa. Common names include roselle and Florida cranberry.
The thickened, bright red calyx (the part of the flower covering the seed pod) is tangy and delicious. They make a vitamin C-rich tea that’s so vibrant red it looks fake. We also use them fresh or dried to make a wide range of foods.
The tender young leaves taste similar to the calyxes and can be eaten fresh or cooked.
Read more:
19. Pink lemonade blueberry
Description: We LOVE blueberries. Hence why we have nine blueberry bushes in our yard. One of those bushes is not like the others: our pink lemonade blueberry.
Instead of dark blue berries, it produces vibrant pink-yellow berries that have a lemon-blueberry flavor. Can you guess our young son’s favorite blueberry bush? Yep, the pink lemonade blueberry. Don’t tell our other blueberry bushes, but it’s probably our favorite too.
Another unique feature of pink lemonade blueberries is that their bushes tend to be a little shorter than standard highbush varieties. Ours is about 15 years old (fully mature) and only about 4′ tall.
20. Mulberries
Read more: You don’t tend to find mulberries for sale in a store because they have such a short shelf life. That’s not a problem for our family since we eat bowls of them within a day of picking.
Mulberries are kind of like a blackberry that grows on a tree, but the berries are softer and sweeter than blackberries. We have two dwarf everbearing cultivars that produce a ton of fruit in the spring and a smaller yield in late summer – early fall. You definitely want dwarf cultivars unless you have a way of picking berries out of the top of a 50′ tall tree.
Tip: When cooked into jams, pies, cobblers, etc, mulberries can be a little insipid since they have a lot of sweet and not much tang. So add a bit of high quality vinegar (like a balsamic glaze) to balance out their flavor with some acid.
21. Stinging nettle
Description: A plant that can bite back, well, sting back? Other than that, there’s a lot to love about stinging nettle. For starters, it’s a low-growing perennial that’s one of the most high protein, nutrient-dense veggies in the world. It also tastes great.
Harvest the tender young growth tips any time from late winter through spring. If you decide to grow rather than forage stinging nettle, make sure you grow it in an area where you can keep it contained, such as a raised bed, or it can quickly take over.
Read more:
- How to grow and use stinging nettle
- Recipe: Stinging nettle quiche
- Recipe: Raw stinging nettle soup (yes, seriously!)
- Recipe: Stinging nettle dip with labne
- Recipe: Stinging nettle green garlic pesto
22. Elderberries
Description: There are lots of different species of elderberries around the world, including red- and blue-fruited varieties. We grow cultivars of the elderberry species native to our region of the US, Sambucus canadensis, commonly called American black elderberry.
All parts of the plant are poisonous except for the small flowers and the ripe fruit. Elderflowers make delicious drinks and are the primary flavoring in the famous French liqueur, St-Germain.
Ripe elderberries aren’t good for fresh eating, but can be cooked or fermented into some rather delicious concoctions. There’s also research showing that elderberry juice/syrup has potent anti-viral properties.
Tip: I used to dread elderberry season (late June – July) because it took me so much time to remove the small fruits from the umbels by hand. Then I started using a steam juicer and cut my work by 95%! (See: Steam juicer – the fastest easiest way to process elderberries.)
Read more:
- How to grow elderberries and elderflowers organically
- Recipe: How to make elderberry syrup
- Recipe: Fermented elderberry syrup
- Recipe: Sparkling elderflower cordial
- Recipe: Elderflower kombucha
23. Chestnuts
Description: American chestnut trees went functionally extinct in the 20th century due to Asian chestnut blight, but other chestnut species and hybrid cultivars are resistant to chestnut blight.
Our hybrid chestnut trees produce a huge amount of nuts each year. Unlike other nuts, chestnuts are high in complex carbohydrates rather than fats and proteins, earning them the moniker “bread of the woods.” The nuts and burrs fall off the trees when the nuts are ripe. Since the burrs are very spiky, be mindful of where you put a chestnut tree (not high-traffic areas or areas where backyard poultry live) and wear very thick gloves when handling them.
Tip: Many people complain of weevils in their chestnuts, but we have almost zero weevil problems. As best we can tell, this is because we gather our chestnuts daily when they’re in season and immediately store them in bags in our fridge. This not only prevents weevils from developing inside the nut, it also prevents them from overwintering and breeding.
Read more:
- How to grow organic chestnuts
- Recipe: How to make roasted chestnuts on your stovetop in a cast iron pan
- Recipe: How to make chestnut flour
- Recipe: Chestnut breakfast porridge with pan-roasted Japanese persimmons
- Recipe: Spruce needle infused chestnut mash
24. Edible roses
Description: We like to stop and eat our roses. We only do that on our own property because most people tend to spray their roses with various types of pesticides.
Rose leaves and flowers are edible, and so is rose “fruit,” the hip. You don’t munch on rose flowers directly, rather you use them as an ingredient – the more fragrant, the better for culinary use. The quality and size of rose hips varies tremendously by cultivar, so if you want rose hips, choose cultivars wisely.
Read more:
- How to select and use edible roses in your garden
- Recipe: Fermented rose flower cordial, the ultimate rose recipe
25. Serviceberries
Description: Serviceberries are a native fruit that tastes like a cross between blueberries and peaches – truly delicious.
However, here in hot humid South Carolina, our serviceberry production is highly variable by year. When we have cooler, wetter springs, cedar apple rust (a fungal disease) can reduce yields to zero. However, warmer, dryer springs can result in very high fruit production with virtually no sign of rust on the fruit.
We grow a dwarf serviceberry bush cultivar in our yard. We forage for serviceberries that grow on larger trees in nearby spots.
Read more:
- Serviceberries: How to grow, forage, and eat
- Recipe: Serviceberry pecan maple crumble
- Recipe: Crustless serviceberry custard pie
- Recipe: Serviceberry cobbler in a cast iron pan
- Recipe: Serviceberry salsa with green coriander
26. Kousa dogwood
Description: No, native dogwood fruit is not edible. In fact, it’s poisonous.
However, there are two dogwood species that produce edible fruit: Kousa dogwood and Cornelian cherry dogwood. Since Kousa dogwoods are a common landscape plant in our area, we regularly forage them. However, you can just as easily grow them in your own edible landscape / home orchard.
Due to hybridization, Kousa dogwood fruit quality varies from tree to tree. We’ve tasted some that’s too sweet to eat and some that tastes like mangos and persimmons.
Read more:
Other contenders…
We’re far from finished in our quest to find rare and unusual edible plants to trial in our gardens. A few others that are worth mentioning below:
- Taro – We plan to trial this productive and resilient root crop next year. Apparently, it performs really well in our hot, humid climate.
- Tree kale – We’ve grown this perennial kale a few times, as has family in Charleston, SC. Our summers are just a bit too hot and our winters a bit too cold for it to perform well here. However, in areas with less extreme temperature differentials, this is a great plant to consider.
- Strawberry spinach – The one time we planned to trial this plant, our seed tray got pummeled by hail while we were away. It’s a cool season leafy green that tastes like spinach and also produces a berry-like fruit.
- Pawpaws – We love ALMOST everything about pawpaws: large delicious fruit, native plant, host plant for certain butterflies, etc. What we don’t like? They contain relatively high levels of annonacin, which is a neurotoxin. Ingestion of fruit in the Annonaceae family (pawpaws included) are increasingly being linked to chronic neurological diseases (atypical Parkinsonism). It’s kind of heartbreaking, but we rarely eat pawpaw fruit anymore (only a few raw fruits when they’re in season) and we no longer recommend other people eat or grow it either.
- Hardy kiwi – Also called kiwi berry, this plant produces small fruits that don’t have the fur-like fiber coating on the skins like other kiwi species. Unlike other kiwis, it can also survive cold winters. We trialed arctic kiwis from 2010-20, back when you had to have a male and female vine to get a yield. It was supposed to start yielding within 5-7 years. Our female produced flowers but our male plant never did. Since the vines were enormous and unproductive, we decided to remove them. There are now self-fertile cultivars available that yield within a few years, so we’re ready to give hardy kiwi another chance.
What did we miss? What should be added to our list of rare and unusual edible garden plants that more gardeners should know about? Hit us up in the comments with your suggestions and questions!
KIGI,
