Each year my wife, Anne, and I combine New Year’s resolutions with the annual barrage of seed catalogs to make our garden plans for the season. This January, we’re resolved to finally grow romanesco, a cultivar of cauliflower that is brilliantly chartreuse and looks like the intergalactic sister of cauliflower and broccoli on LSD. Next on our list is mâche, aka cornsalad or lamb’s lettuce, which crowds the produce section of Spain and France, but is relatively unknown here. Very mild with a slightly nutty note, it was regarded as a weed for years in Europe, so we figure it ought to thrive like all the other weeds that crowd our vegetable beds. Something we have not seen in Spain, despite recent trips to visit our newly sprouted granddaughter, is the black Spanish radish. Reputed to have “an earthy, spicy, bitter and pungent flavor,” and, yes, black on the outside, why wouldn’t we plant them? And we’ve always wanted to try the candy-cane striped Chioggia beets, so this is the year, we’ve decided we’re going to. After all, beets thrive in our soil. Salsify, radicchio and cucamelons are on our list, the latter described by epicgardening.com’s “27 Unusual and Rare Vegetables to Grow This Season” as “adorable grape-sized fruits that look like baby watermelons and taste like tart cucumbers.” Aaaaaw. Who doesn’t like a cute vegetable?

In the way of past successes with out-of-the-ordinary veggies, Anne and I recommend planting goober peas — can you say boiled peanuts? Sea Island field peas were both a culinary and gardening success and, like peanuts, they’re great at crowding out weeds as a ground cover. Another import from Spain is the Canary melon. Oval and yellow, it has a creamy texture, with a sweet, slightly musky taste. We’ve also had great success with purple green beans, which garnered comments from our neighbors, such as “Well, I never.”

In the “Don’t Plant” category, we would list heritage okra, the seeds of which we got from Old Salem, but which had the texture of a canine chew toy. Not even our dog would eat it. Malabar spinach goes gangbusters, is hearty and resists pests, but maybe that’s because of its taste, which reminded me of various inedible plants I tried as a kid. Jerusalem artichokes are fun, but be careful. Yes, you can eat them like potatoes, but they are definitely a moveable feast; and, if you let them, they’ll take over your entire garden. I should add to our long list of flops — celeriac, which we tried again and again, but never got beyond seedlings. Parsnips, kohlrabi and rutabagas have all fizzled for us, but maybe that’s the weather, our soil or the Sage Gardener’s lack of sagacity. We’ve always wanted to grow rhubarb, but decided not to after a yankee in our community garden repeatedly tried with limited success.

On my personal gardener’s bucket list? Dragon fruit. Also corn smut, which only visited my corn once, but I didn’t get around to cooking it before it grew so smutty it looked X-rated. I’ve also dreamed of growing the vaunted corpse flower. And while we’re on the subject of mutability, how about a century plant, which is monocarpic, meaning it only flowers at the very end of its long life, which is more like 10–30 years rather than 100. Granted, at 78, what are the odds of my seeing it bloom? But nothing ventured, nothing grown. — David Claude Bailey