The Least Favorite Vegetables to Grow in the Garden

Vegetable gardening, just like anything else in life, is comprised of people from all walks of life and culture and because it is so vast, we wanted to get a better handle on what people grow and more importantly what they don’t grow. So we went ahead and asked our thousands of subscribers on our vegetable gardening fan page on Facebook this specific question. What is your least favorite vegetable to grow? One that you avoid like the plague and can't understand why anyone else would want to grow it in the first place

We received a tremendous amount of responses, some of which were a surprise to us since we grow that vegetable ourselves and some we never heard of. Here is a portion of that list.

The biggest surprise on the list to us was zucchini. We absolutely love zucchini. You can make breads with it, soups, steam it, you name it. But apparently as one Facebook member put it, “it grows like a weed”, it is not as popular with others.

This next vegetable we agree with and that is brussel sprouts. We do not grow them ourselves and as one Facebook member put it, “lots of plant for little return…takes up space that could be better used for something {else}”. But dot not fret sprouts fans, there were plenty of defenders of the veggie, we just weren’t one of them.

Another shocker to us was eggplant. Many wrote not liking it more for the texture of the vegetable when you eat it rather than growing it. We shared some recipes for eggplant parmesan in hopes that those members that are against it would change their minds. We shall see.

Cabbage, hot peppers, chicory and mustard, were about a tie but mostly because some didn’t like the taste of cabbage, others did not know what to do with cabbage once harvested, many do not like the heat from hot peppers and one person was allergic to mustard, which we found unique.

With all that said, the number one crop that people “avoid like plague”, drum roll please, is okra. One person wrote in saying it gave him nightmares from his childhood when the school lunch cafeteria person would put it in everything and tasted horrible, to another person that says growing okra made her “itch like crazy”. The bad results for okra came in like wildfire that we started feeling sorry for it.

The poll, albeit unscientific of course, was a fun question to ask and gave us real insight into the vegetable gardening world of what vegetable gardeners won’t grow.

About the Author
Mike is the owner of Mike the Gardener Enterprises, LLC where you can sign up for their Seeds of the Month Club and receive 4 packs of vegetable, fruit and herb seeds every month.