Okra

A cool-season annual legume of the bean family (Fabaceae), also called broad bean, grown as a vegetable for its edible seeds and pods. NC State Extension describes a stiffly erect plant 2 to 6 feet tall with leaves of 2-6 leaflets and conspicuous toothed stipules, bearing fragrant white spring-and-summer flowers marked with a purplish or brown blotch. The fruit is a narrowly oblong flattened pod up to 11 inches long holding up to 6 large oval seeds. Like other legumes it fixes nitrogen from the air and is often used as a cover crop; it grows best in cool weather, with poor yields once daytime temperatures exceed the mid-70s.

A Mediterranean thistle relative grown as a perennial vegetable for its large, unopened flower bud - the edible "globe" of overlapping fleshy bracts harvested before bloom. It forms an upright clump of deeply lobed, jagged silver-green leaves, with flower stalks rising to 3 to 5 feet. Left unharvested, the buds open to spectacular violet-blue thistle flowers up to 7 inches across that are a magnet for bees.

A tall, warm-season annual grass grown for its sweet kernels - one of the largest crops in the home vegetable garden at 4 to 5 feet. Corn is wind-pollinated, so it must be sown in a block of several rows rather than a single line for the tassels to set a full ear. A heavy feeder that wants full sun, fertile soil, and steady water; some sweet-corn types are spoiled by cross-pollination from other corn varieties, so isolation and harvest timing matter.

The cultivated cereal oat, an erect cool-season annual grass grown for grain, forage, and - increasingly in gardens - as a fast, soil-building cover crop. From a spring or late-summer sowing it shoots up to 2 to 4 feet of slender, upright culms topped by an open, airy seed head (a spreading panicle) whose dangling spikelets ripen from green to gold. Domesticated in the Old World from wild oats, it is not a native wildflower but a true annual crop: it germinates fast, smothers weeds, builds biomass, and in cold zones conveniently winter-kills to leave an easy mulch in spring. Gardeners reach for it most as a green manure and erosion-stopping nurse crop, and for the soft, grassy texture and ripening-gold seed heads it adds while it grows.

A compact, warm-season annual cereal grass - finger millet, also known as ragi - grown for its tiny, exceptionally nutritious reddish grain. Its seed heads split into a cluster of incurved, finger-like spikes (the source of the name), and it is a hardy, storable staple of the East African highlands and South India. Honest reality: it is a frost-tender, warm-season annual for full sun, sown after the last frost once the soil is warm. It copes well with drought and poor soils and tolerates a wider range of altitude and rainfall than the other millets, and its gluten-free grain is rich in calcium and iron and stores for years - eaten as flour, porridge, and in brewing. Outside the tropics it is grown as a summer annual.

A long-lived clump-forming perennial vegetable grown for its thick, tart leaf stalks (petioles), which range from deep red to pink to green and are used in sauces, jams, and pies. Bold, heart-shaped dark green leaves rise 2 to 3 feet over a wide crown, and tall whitish flower panicles appear from late spring into summer. The leaf blades are NOT edible - they carry toxic levels of oxalic acid - only the stalks are eaten.