Vegetables: Early History to 1850

The original settlers initially had little time for vegetable gardening. Instead, they subsisted mostly on grains, meat, fish, and game—and the occasional leaf of spinach to keep scurvy at bay. Native Americans already produced beans, squash, and flint corn (not the sweet corn we know today), and settlers adopted these “three sisters” early and avidly, bringing them into their kitchen gardens to grow among the English and European transplants. Onions might have been the first vegetable planted in the colonies—they enlivened the drab monotony of a daily porridge. Other sturdy specimens, such as cabbages, and roots—from skirrets (a relative of the carrot) and swedes (or rutabagas, so called by virtue of their popularity in Scandinavia) to turnips, beets, parsnips, and carrots—took residence in the root cellar without withering to death. Cucumbers and radishes also counted among the first of the Old World crops cultivated in the colonies, and both culinary and medicinal herbs were planted in vegetable gardens.