Try Hand at Growing Unusual Vegetables

Broccoli has gone to flower and pea vines are turning brown, sure signs it must be time to plant summer’s vegetables. After the tomatoes and eggplants, cucumbers and beans, consider something to wake up those tired taste buds, something to make this year’s garden a little different, something like sweet potatoes and capers.

The sweet potatoes in particular are a real treat, but not because of those edible tubers that regularly appear around Thanksgiving. It’s the leaves and young stems that are a tasty surprise, and you can only grow your own, they won’t be found at markets.

As for capers, well, some people think they’re delicious, just the thing to spice up tartar or other sauces and salads.

You don’t even need a vegetable garden to grow these two. One can be trellised on a wall and the other can be planted in with other small shrubs or perennials.

The caper, Capparis spinosa , is a smallish, drought-tolerant, deciduous shrub, native to the Mediterranean. Seen in the company of carob, grapes and olives, it is common in gardens from Spain to Israel where the showy white flowers and fluffy violet stamens add a touch of summer color.

David and Tina Silber think it should be common in California gardens as well. In Granada Hills, they grow theirs at the top of a retaining wall where it gets about 1 1/2 feet tall, spreading or spilling, to four or more feet.

They also grow it in large terra cotta pots (15 inches in diameter), and in nursery containers to sell from their back yard Papaya Tree Nursery (contact them by calling (818) 363-3680). Other nurseries that specialize in rare fruits or vegetables, such as Pacific Tree Farms in Chula Vista, also carry caper plants.

Like olives, the caper flower buds must be treated so they lose their initial bitter taste, but it is an easy process.

Tina Silber says to pick the flower buds when they are about the size of a pea. The caper blooms all summer and into fall so there will be time for many pickings.

Pour a cup of buds into a plastic bag and then cover with kosher or non-iodized table salt and then let them sit at room temperature for 10 to 14 days. Check to see that the bitter taste is gone by rinsing a bud and tasting it. If they are ready, rinse all the buds and use, or store them in a jar, filled with 1 part vinegar and 2 parts water, in the refrigerator.

David Silber says the plant is extremely easy to grow, taking any kind of soil, as long as the ground doesn’t become soggy. He only waters the plants in the ground every 2 months, but does water deeply. Plants briefly lose their leaves in late winter.

Everyone has grown sweet potatoes with toothpicks in a glass of water, but they do even better in the ground, where they quickly become an eight-foot or larger vine.

Jimmy Bautista grew up on sweet potatoes in his native Philippines and he still grows the sprawling vines in his side yard in Pasadena, where they are trellised against the house, close by the back door so they are handy for the cook.

He keeps them up off the ground so the young shoots stay clean because that is his favorite part of the plant. The tender new growth, leaves and stems, is tastier than spinach or chard, and is used in many Philippine dishes.

His wife, Hermie, makes a delicious salad called kamote and a soup named sinigang that mixes the leaves with pork spareribs.

He starts new plants from cuttings taken in late fall and rooted indoors. He simply cuts off about 18 inches of stem tip and sticks them in a pail of water. Most winters, the tropical vines die completely to the ground, so he always makes sure new cuttings are standing by.

The tubers form along the roots, close to the base of the vine and each plant usually produces a few each summer that Jimmy Bautista carefully digs up and dries in the sun for several days before cooking. It takes a lot of vine to get a few tubers, so the sweet potatoes themselves are seen simply as a bonus.

Choose a sunny place because these vines love heat and moisture, being native to South America. They are not, incidentally, related to regular potatoes and are not “yams,” which are native to the Old World.

Young plants are sold through seed catalogues but can’t be shipped to California, so the best way to begin is to sprout a tuber in a jar of water like you did when you were a kid, then snap off the sprouts when they are about a foot long and plant those. They will take root quickly.

Or plant an entire tuber the first year, and take cuttings from it in future years.