Reading a cookbook or watching tutorials of your favourite delicacies might not enhance your culinary skills. You’d require proper ingredients to prepare the gala meal. You’d have to buy the exotic vegetables, spices, and other ingredients for the preparations. But what if you don’t get those exotic veggies from the market during your last-minute prep?
One reason why you might hesitate at preparing those authentic dishes you watched lately is due to lack of ingredients. And that’s how you end up preparing the food – unprofessionally cooked, carelessly seasoned, and poorly garnished! Coming back to the lockdown days, people have been discovering new hobbies. Gardening is one of them!
Additionally, today you need to concentrate on eating healthy rather than eating spicy food. When you give blood and sweat to your job, eating and living healthy becomes your only priority, does it not? Amidst the concept of eating healthy & staying wealthy, does making homegrown veggies mean anything significant? Let’s learn the answer through this post today.
Outlining the Importance of Kitchen Garden/Vegetable Garden
Want to design a miniature firm of veggies and herbs? You can do so and plant exotic veggies in your kitchen garden. When used wisely, your kitchen garden turns out to be an incredible source of fresh and nutritious fruits & veggies. Besides garden beds, you can create a vegetable garden in a balcony, terrace, patio, or window boxes.
One big perk of planting exotic veggies at home is you get access to fresh harvests. Your veggies are nutritious and contain detoxifying components. You get everything: from vitamins, minerals, to fibres and more! Again, besides purifying the surrounding air, it even gives you an opportunity to culture a new hobby. Lastly, the biggest advantage of such a garden is you get to recycle your veggies.
Must-Include Homegrown Veggies to Plant in Your Kitchen Garden
Homegrown vegetables have an authenticity, no matter how old-school that may sound. The 2020 pandemic has already given a host of examples where people took up this hobby and reached new heights. Historically speaking, exotic veggies have eventually garnered immense popularity in India.
People now use them in preparing local dishes. In India, the introduction to vegetables described as unusual roots over some decades ago. While some have become household names, others are slowing getting fan-favourite. If you want to try your hands on vegetable gardening this year, here’s presenting the exotic and easy homegrown veggies.
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Zucchini
It’s a summer crop and happens to be the squash family’s part. Believed to grow incredibly well in the house garden, it’s the second veggie in this list. If you are using a container, please plant a single sampling in each of them. It bears separate female and male flowers, whereby the female gets identified as the mini fruit.
It gets attached at flower’s base and requires manual pollination at times. When you only have male flowers, you can wait for the female one to appear. Its flowers generally bloom late at night or even during the dawn. Growing the plant is never that difficult unless and until you don’t consider the rules of standard soil. Remember that overwatering might result in a negative direction.
Even if you don’t see flowers appearing, be patient to wait. The last thing to do is to let the plant mature to enjoy its taste in salads, stir-fries, and roasted meat. It’s a healthy veggie to give a mouth-watering flavour to almost all healthy meals.
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Chicken Spinach
Also known as Florida spinach, Chicken spinach is one of the amazing exotic veggies at home. The beauty lies in its fleshy and thick leaves. You can grow it from one cutting or its seeds without any trouble. You can harvest its outer leaves and use it for garnishing or cooking a dish.
Health-conscious people can enjoy their taste in salad preparations. Also, do not forget to use a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of lime to enhance its flavour. Since growing the plant isn’t a challenging job, watering it should get prim-and-properly done.
The plant has high levels of omega-3 fatty acids yet neglected as one ingredient. This perennial plant requires good soil for its continuous growth. Hence, always concentrate on watering the plant. Never let its soil dry out or get too wet. For stir-fry dishes, it’s incidentally a great ingredient. Raita lovers can also garnish the yoghurt dish with it. Add a fresh pot of these leaves in your garden full of easy homegrown veggies.
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Romaine Lettuce
After zucchini, here’s presenting this one! These fresh and crunchy leaves make a perfect addition to your containing gardening. Growing it in your balcony, patio, or window boxes, is never a sky-high wish! Given the shallowness of these leaves, the pot doesn’t require being too deep. Using a wider pot is a better idea, indeed.
To prepare a fresh salad ingredient directly in your yard, you need to choose the soil properly. Use organic soil and an area which can get direct sunlight! Lettuce requires a location that can get around 6 hours of sunlight. Do keep in mind that you have to provide an afternoon shade to the plant. It’ll prevent the plant from getting dehydrated and stressed.
Rather than throwing its centre away, you can put them in the soil and grow newer varieties. You’ll see new leaves directly poking through the soil after a couple of days. You can repeat the process a million times!
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Broccoli
Calling it a perfect addition to your Keto diet is never really an exaggeration. After all, this veggie has given vegans the chance to embrace the magical health benefits of ‘healthy & tasty’ veggies. Even if you’re not a vegan, you can still use it in your Pasta dishes (ones that you prefer with white or mixed sauce).
You can sow the seeds in the yard or pot. Consider choosing an area that gets sunlight. Plant the seeds and water them regularly. There’s a range of varieties to choose from. Ever since the concept of ‘exotic’ veggies seemed to dominate the Indian vegetable market, broccoli has been a popular vegetables. Its healthy attributes have proven it as a great veggie!
After all, it’s just not a mere alternative to cauliflower but also a great source of vitamins and minerals! You can add it to your salad recipes or enjoy a spicy taste of chilli broccoli!
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Corn
If you have an expansive amount of space in your yard, growing corn is as simple as ever. The only thing you need to remember is to grow it in full sunlight and fertile soil. When planting corn seeds, you need to plant them in rows. You can space 4-6 inches apart in the rows. Each row should have a difference of three feet from each other.
After planting, watering becomes an integral part of the process. The seeds usually sprout in 10 to 14 days. Planting four rows at four feet distance from each other ensures proper pollination. During the dry weather, don’t forget to dry deeply. You can watch the tutorials to make your task easier.
Having a corn garden in the yard ensures you get the flavoursome taste of Italian, Mexican, and spicy Indian cuisines. Add it as a topping to your meal or prepare a meal with corn (maybe, chilli sweet corn) – there’s an endless variety!
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Bell Peppers
After corn, here’s presenting another exotic vegetables! You already know the significance of capsicum in Chinese delicacies. But there’s little that those colourful capsicums tell you about its variety. Yes, they are popularly familiar as bell peppers. And growing is a perfect addition to your exotic vegetables garden.
Being an integral element to every Indian kitchen, it can get prepared very easily. You need to prepare the mix and start the sowing process. The late winter, spring, or summer’s beginning are perfect times for sowing.
It grows extensively well in a moderate temperature. Once its seeds get germinated in 10 or 15 days, half the work gets done. It only takes 60 to 90 days for the fresh bell peppers to grow. Only then can you enjoy the taste of bell peppers in exotic dishes!
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Sweet Potato
Despite being an underrated vegetables, it has acquired immense popularity as one of the homegrown veggies. After all, it packs a lot of nutrition and requires warm weather for its growth. Only remember that it needs generous sunlight to grow. Its leaves also contain essential nutrients.
You can include it in your home garden from the cutting. Alternatively, you can also plant it. Homeowners consider that planting the whole potato is the best way to grow it. A healthy way to cook it is by cutting it into wedges & baking it with mustard oil & pepper. Without a sweet potato plant, your garden full of exotic veggies at home might stay incomplete.
Drawing the Closure
Besides the aforementioned vegetables, you can enhance the diversifying beauty of your garden by adding more vibrancy. For that reason, include tomatoes, chillies, green onions, eggplant, etc. & create your bright & beautiful garden of easy homegrown veggies.