Finger millet

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 tall, warm-season annual cereal grass grown for its nutritious grain - pearl millet, the staple of the driest farmed lands of the West African Sahel. GBIF records it as a crop domesticated in the West African Sahel, the most drought- and heat-hardy of the major cereals, now grown as a warm-season annual across the world's hot, low-rainfall regions. The plant throws up stout, strappy-leaved stems topped by a dense, cylindrical, cattail-like spike that bears both the flowers and, later, the small round grain; purple-leaved ornamental forms such as "Purple Majesty" are also grown in the border for their dark, bold spikes. The grain is a nutritious, gluten-free staple ground into flour or cooked as porridge, so the harvest is the crop. HONESTY: this is a frost-tender, warm-season annual for full sun that is exceptionally drought- and heat-tolerant - it yields a grain crop on hot, sandy, low-rainfall ground where other cereals fail. Sow after the last frost once the soil is warm; it needs a long, warm season, and outside the tropics it is grown as a summer annual.

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) is a tall, robust, warm-season annual cereal GRASS grown for its grain - a drought-hardy C4 staple that feeds much of semi-arid Africa and Asia. GBIF records it as a domesticated cereal first cultivated in north-eastern Africa and the Sahel (the region of Sudan and Ethiopia), now grown across the world's warm drylands far beyond its center of origin. The plant throws up broad, maize-like leaves and a dense terminal panicle of grain that ripens cream, red, or brown. HONESTY: this is a FROST-TENDER, warm-season ANNUAL - sow it after the last frost when the soil is warm, in FULL SUN, and give it a long warm season; outside the tropics it is grown as a summer annual, and the 9a-11 range reflects only where it could perennialize or its warm-season window. It is far more drought- and heat-tolerant than maize, idling through dry spells and resuming when rain returns, but it crops best with some summer moisture in well-drained soil. Honest caution: young or stressed, wilted leaves can carry CYANOGENIC compounds (a real risk for grazing livestock), but the mature GRAIN is a safe, gluten-free staple eaten as flour, porridge, and in brewing.

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 heat-loving annual of the mallow family (Malvaceae), native to the Old World tropics and grown for its edible seed pods - the backbone of gumbo. Plants reach 3 to 5 feet with showy hibiscus-like, single-day yellow flowers carrying a deep purple center. It thrives where summers are hot: seed should not go out until the soil reaches 60°F, and the first pods follow about 55 days after germination.