Plant Parts to Eat

Imagine a big garden full of different kinds of fruit and vegetables and yourself as the gardener there. You have lots of seeds to plant and lots of plants to harvest. You wake up in the morning haze to take care of your beautiful garden. Even if we are not gardeners with a beautiful garden to take care of, we can still enjoy eating the fresh plants in our garden. Do you know what parts of different plants we can eat?

We eat the stem of asparagus, but we eat the leaves of lettuce. We also eat the delicious fruit on plants, and there are usually seeds in it. We eat the seeds of cucumbers, strawberries and kiwi fruit. People don’t usually eat the seeds of apples or pears. Corn and peas are seeds, and carrots and potatoes are the roots of their plants. Cauliflower and broccoli produce flowers, and we eat them!

Sometimes people eat more than one part of a plant. For example, people generally eat the root of the beet, but you may also use its leaves in salad when the plant is young.

When it grows, the leaves become bitter. Onions are also like beets. We eat both the root and the stems.

Some plants have poisonous parts, and we shouldn’t eat those parts. The tomato plant has poisonous leaves. Long ago, people didn’t eat tomatoes because they thought all parts of the plant were poisonous. However, today we know the fruit part is not dangerous to us. It’s very delicious and has a lot of vitamins.