Garden tomato

Aji pepper is the South American chili species behind aji amarillo, Lemon Drop, Bishop's crown and Brazil's dedo-de-moça - one of the five domesticated chili peppers, and a different plant from the familiar garden pepper (Capsicum annuum) and the habanero (Capsicum chinense). It is a perennial shrub native from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru through Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, northern Argentina and central and southern Brazil, and where it can live for years it grows taller than most garden peppers, up to about 6.6 feet. Its white to cream flowers are typically marked with green or gold, and its fruits, which usually hang down in cultivated forms, come in an unusually wide range of shapes, from long tapered pods to the crown-shaped Bishop's crown. Heat runs from nearly heatless types to hot ones; aji amarillo is rated around 30,000-50,000 Scoville units. It is frost tender, so outside nearly frost-free climates it is grown as a warm-weather annual.

A lax, branching nightshade from South America grown for tart-sweet golden berries, each wrapped in a papery, lantern-like husk. Despite the name it is unrelated to true gooseberries: the "Cape" is usually traced to its early cultivation at South Africa's Cape of Good Hope, and it is also known as goldenberry, Peruvian groundcherry, and poha. Taller and longer-lived than the ground cherry, it reaches 3.3 to 4.9 feet with velvety heart-shaped leaves and nodding yellow flowers marked with chocolate-brown centers. It is a reliable perennial only where frost is absent and is grown as a summer annual or a greenhouse plant everywhere colder. Only the fully ripe fruit is eaten - the husk, leaves, stems, flowers, and unripe fruit are poisonous - and it has become invasive in Hawaii and on other Pacific islands.

An Andean grain crop grown for its small, protein-rich seeds, which ripen in dense heads of white, red or black at the top of an upright annual usually 3.3 to 6.6 feet tall. Quinoa is a pseudocereal, not a grass: it belongs to the amaranth family (the goosefoot genus was formerly placed in Chenopodiaceae), is related to spinach, and shares its genus with the garden weed lambsquarters. The seeds carry a bitter saponin coat that must be soaked and rinsed off before cooking, and the young leaves are eaten cooked like spinach. A true annual sown each spring, it does best where summers are cool and may not produce seed where temperatures run too hot.

A fast cool-season annual of the mustard family grown for its peppery, mustard-like salad greens - irregular, pinnately-lobed basal leaves in a low rosette, each with 4 to 10 small lateral lobes and a large terminal lobe (Missouri Botanical Garden). First cultivated by the ancient Greeks and Romans and still widely grown across Europe, it is best grown in the cooler spring and fall months rather than summer heat; leaves are harvested young and tender before they turn strong and bitter. Pale-yellow four-petalled flowers with dark brown or purple veins appear in corymbs if plants are left to bloom.

A cool-weather leafy cabbage relative grown for its broad, leathery, blue-green leaves that grow in a loose upright rosette on a thick stem - never forming a head ("acephala" is Greek for headless). A biennial almost always grown as an annual, it sweetens after a fall frost and, in mild-winter regions, keeps producing leaves through winter until it bolts in spring. One of the most cold-tolerant vegetables in the cabbage family.

A warm-season member of the nightshade family (Solanaceae) - a relative of tomato, potato, and pepper - grown for its showy, glossy edible berries that range from white and green through deep purple to nearly black depending on cultivar. The plant is technically a tender herbaceous perennial but is grown as an annual vegetable across most of North America, where it demands a long, hot, frost-free season to fruit well. Drooping violet star-shaped flowers give way to the familiar pendant fruit; the leaves, flowers, stems, and roots are toxic and only the fruit is eaten.