Eat Ugly
August 8th, 2017
Don’t fuss if the harvest coming out of your organic garden doesn’t look like the pristine produce that graces grocery stores.
Compacted soil can lead to double-forked “walking carrots,” while poor pollination is usually behind this “catfacing” of tomatoes.
Forked carrots, pock-marked potatoes, malformed eggplants that look like they’re delivering a baby, and other flawed fruits and vegetables are usually perfectly fine to eat.
There’s even some evidence that damaged produce is sweeter and more nutritious than their impeccable brethren.
So whatever you do, don’t toss your pickings just because they’re a little, well, ugly.
Unlike at grocery stores – where paying customers expect and demand perfection – home gardeners can be more forgiving and less wasteful.
The reason most deformed produce becomes ugly is not from some ruinous condition or risky infection. It’s usually related to harmless reactions to growing conditions that cause superficial imperfections.
Some reasons why your plants might become “cosmetically challenged:”
* Pollination issues. Female plant parts of fruiters such as tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, peppers, and eggplants need pollen from male parts to “set” fruit.
Sometimes bees and other pollinating insects do the work. Sometimes it’s by wind and gravity.
When you get no pollination, you get no fruit. But when partial pollination happens, that’s when you get things like lop-sided apples, warped blackberries, and corn with missing kernels.
There’s nothing wrong with the malformed results. It just looks uncouth enough to earn a place in the estimated 20 to 30 percent of commercial crops that don’t make it to harvest due to cosmetic failure.
Besides lack of bees, extreme summer heat is a big reason for poor pollination. When temperatures hit 90 degrees, pollen of many crops suffers (especially tomatoes), causing fruit to stop setting.
