Sorghum

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.

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.

Achiote, also sold as annatto or lipstick tree, is a fast-growing evergreen shrub or small tree native from Mexico through Central America to Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and northern Argentina, and planted across the tropics for its seeds. Clusters of pink or white flowers about 2 inches across, like single wild roses, open at the branch tips and are followed by clusters of red to red-brown capsules covered in soft bristles, which split open to show seeds coated in a waxy red-orange layer. That coating is annatto: the coloring and mild seasoning behind achiote paste and sazón, the yellow-orange of many cheeses, butters, and margarines, and the red body paint and lipstick that gave the plant its English name. In a garden it usually stays 6 to 12 feet tall and wide as a specimen or informal hedge, though as a tree it can reach 20 to 30 feet. It is frost-tender and needs a frost-free climate: it is hardy outdoors in USDA zones 10a-12b and grown elsewhere in a large container or conservatory that comes indoors before frost. Outside its native range it has naturalized on many Pacific islands, sparingly so in Hawaii, and in the Galapagos, where the Charles Darwin Foundation rates it potentially invasive.

A native eastern + central North American thicket-forming shrub producing arching thorny canes + clusters of large sweet black berries in mid-to-late summer. Among the most important wildlife fruit producers in eastern forests - birds, mammals, + insects all depend on the fruit. Like raspberry, biennial-caned (primocane year 1, fruits in year 2 as floricane, then dies back). Spreads via root suckers + tip-rooting cane tips; manage with annual pruning.

A fast, suckering native shrub of streambanks and moist thickets across eastern North America, grown for huge flat-topped cymes of tiny lemon-scented white flowers in early summer and the clusters of dark elderberry drupes that follow. Spreads by root suckers into naturalized colonies 5 to 12 feet tall and wide; the flowers feed butterflies and the showy fruit feeds birds. The raw berries are not eaten fresh - they are cooked into jelly, pie, and wine.