Gardening: A vibrant harvest

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Turn to colorful varieties of autumn-harvest fruits and vegetables to celebrate the season on your plate, tabletop and doorstep. Left: yellow cauliflower, multicolored carrots and purple Chinese long beans; right: heirloom winter squashes. Photos: © 2019 Fred Greaves

My first vegetable garden contained the usual staples: corn, tomatoes, beans, squash, bell peppers and maybe eggplant. I remember making furrows so I could let the water snake through the garden.

Things have changed. Today, my vegetable garden is a lot more diverse and hugely more colorful. It certainly provides fresh vegetables and fruits for my family to eat, but they also often double as décor before we eat them. This time of year, all the fall colors I could care for can be found in freshly harvested arrangements on my tables and at my doorstep.

The standard white cauliflower has been replaced with one that is a nutty yellow-orange. Cauliflower also comes in lime green and neon purple. I've planted the usual orange carrots, but alongside them are ones that are white, purple and yellow. Green beans have given way to purple Chinese long beans—as lovely to look at as they are delicious to eat. Bunches of golden beets add seasonal splashes of warm color to my plate.

Top of my list are the many shapes and colors of winter squash. Nothing heralds fall like a display of assorted winter squashes by the front door. I like to grow the sort of flat ones and then I stack them on the porch. And while I love their names—musquee de Provence, speckled hound, shokichi shiro, delicata, Lakota—I never label them, so don't know which are which.

Oh, and gourds: such variety of shape. This year, I have a few of the ones I've nicknamed flamingo gourds on account of their shape.

If you have some room at the back of your vegetable garden, plant a row of golden raspberry bushes. As long as you manage them, they won't become a tangled mess, and they'll reward you with golden berries that are both tasty and beautiful.

I love to slip a few non-edible plants into the mix, and broomcorn is one of my favorites. It comes back year after year, so plant it where you want it from the start. The stems were indeed once used to make brooms, but for me the lure is the colorful seeds in shades of bronze, black and maroon. Cut the whole plant to the ground, and you have an instant arrangement.

Vegetable gardening has certainly become more colorful as it has stayed beautiful, practical and rewarding, and the bounty of this season showcases the joy of gardening.

Pat Rubin