Not Only for the Well-Heeled

Miniature vegetables are one size extreme that strikes the vegetable fancier’s imagination — witness all those bags of “mini” carrots lined up on market shelves. Those carrots are just one of many miniature vegetables you can grow yourself.

According to Truman Capote, people once thought you could judge the rich by the vintage of their wine or the number of their homes, but what truly mattered was the size of their vegetables: they were tiny. Perhaps that’s still a measure of wealth.

For the rest of us, cuteness must be one of the appeals of miniature vegetables. Just picture pearl onions swimming in a steaming bowl of peas, a plate of buttery, baby potatoes, or those glazed, lilliputian ears of corn mingling with water chestnuts and snowpeas in a Chinese restaurant stir fry.

Easy to Grow

Far from being hard to grow, miniature vegetables often are easier to grow than full-sized ones. You don’t even need to plant a special variety of corn to get baby corn, so you could pick it this year from a patch intended for full-size ears. All you do is pick the ears just as the silks are showing.

These small ears do give you a lot less to eat, so if you want to grow baby corn, do it more efficiently: grow any multi-eared variety, such as Six-Shooter or Festivity; plant close, giving each plant about a square foot. And plan to grow something else after harvest, because baby corn matures a few weeks earlier than sweet corn.

Besides cuteness, baby corn does have good texture, a trait shared by some other baby vegetables. Baby zucchinis, for example, are so much more tender and succulent than their grown up counterparts. For some eye appeal, harvest baby zucchinis while their flowers are still attached. Baby potatoes have skins so tender as to be almost nonexistent.

But take note. Baby potatoes have tender skins only if they are truly babies, rather than mature but small potatoes.

Not Babies, Just Small

A number of miniature vegetables are not baby vegetables, but vegetables that never get large. Tom Thumb is a buttercrunch type of lettuce that matures to tennis ball sized heads (not very tasty, in my opinion). Choco, Shanghai Green, and Mei Quing are all miniature Bok Choy type cabbages. For miniature Napa type Chinese cabbages, there is, for example, Minuet or Little Jade. All these varieties never get large.

Some vegetables or vegetable varieties that aren’t normally miniature don’t mind being made so. I set my cabbage plants only a foot apart for just this reason. For even smaller cabbages, I have grown them in spring and then, after harvesting, cut their heads off rather than pulling up the plants. More than one new head develops right where I cut. According to how big I want the subsequent heads to develop, I snap off all but two, three, or four of them, with more heads remaining resulting in smaller ones. (This response is one demonstration of apical dominance, explained in my book THE EVER CURIOUS GARDENER.)

The British evidently find normal cauliflower heads to be too large, so developed what they call mini-caulis. All it takes to grow mini-caulis is to plant them at a six by six inch spacing. This is an easier way to grow cauliflowers, and what you end up with is a single serving.

What about those baby carrots resting in plastic bags on market shelves? They’re not babies, but normal size carrots harvested mature then cut up and pared down to look like baby ones. (I picture Santa’s elves doing their off-season work at lathes, honing down large carrots to baby-size.)

Baby CUT carrots

Don’t feel cheated, though. Miniature varieties of carrots do exist. But a full grown, miniature variety of carrot, such as Tonda di Parigi, Atlas, or Parisienne, is not necessarily sweeter or in any way tastier than a good, large variety like Scarlet Nantes.

Miniature carrots

And no variety of carrot tastes better when harvested young — that is, when it’s still a baby.

Young carrots

But do grow these miniatures or other miniature vegetables if you want to feel rich.