by Emma Cooper

Created on: February 11, 2008

As a kitchen gardener, my favorite plants are the ones that grow well for me and in my garden and provide something tasty to eat - the ones I look forward to growing all year.

Many of my favorites grow during the winter months, when just having something growing in the kitchen garden is a satisfaction in itself.

First on the list are Jerusalem artichokes, or sunchokes. They're a fabulously easy plant to grow, requiring almost no care and attention. They'll survive hot summers, wet winters and everything in between to give a bountiful winter harvest when there's not much else to gather. Some people, I know, aren't as fond of their invasive tendencies or the gas that eating them tend to produce, but they make a lovely soup and are a winter treat.

Garlic is another plant that grows through the winter without any trouble, and even in a small garden you can grow enough bulbs to last you through much of the year. I grow two types of garlic - soft necked garlic, which stores for a long time, and hard necked garlic which grows beautiful curly flowering scapes and it therefore sometimes called Serpent garlic.

Continuing in the same vein, onions are my third favorite plant. I grow Japanese onions from sets, planted in the fall and left to overwinter. They provide a slightly earlier harvest than onions planted in the spring, but I just love having plants growing through the bleak winters.

Another overwintering favorite is chard and leaf beet, two related vegetables that provide leafy greens in all but the nastiest winter weather. Chard is a large plant with glossy green leaves and colored leaf ribs - so beautiful that many people grow it in their flower borders. Leaf beet is its smaller cousin, plain green but good tempered and so easy to grow. A dash of color in the vegetable garden in all weathers, a harvest of healthy leaves for the kitchen and a firm favorite with the other occupants of my garden - the chickens.

My last winter favorite is the last to provide a harvest - the purple sprouting broccoli. Purple sprouting broccoli is one of the tortoises of the kitchen garden. Grown from seed in the spring time it grows for a whole year before it produces the flower buds that we eat, but the harvest comes during the 'hungry gap' when there's not much food coming from the garden. And beyond that, it's delicate and buttery flavor is well worth the wait and one of the major joys of homegrown vegetables. Its season may be short and long-awaited, but it's not a treat you can pass

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