Vegetables Word Search

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carrot

Carrots were once purple, white, or yellow; Dutch growers bred the sweet orange kind we know around the late 1500s.

potato

In 1995 the potato became the first vegetable grown in space, on a NASA experiment aboard the shuttle Columbia.

tomato

The tomato is botanically a fruit, but in 1893 the US Supreme Court ruled it a vegetable for tax purposes.

cabbage

Sailors once ate cabbage fermented as sauerkraut on long voyages; its vitamin C helped keep deadly scurvy away.

spinach

Spinach can grow in cold weather, and winter varieties make extra sugar that helps protect their leaves from freezing.

pumpkin

Giant pumpkins can outweigh small cars, but ordinary pumpkins are mostly water, making their enormous size less solid than it seems.

cucumber

The wild squirting cucumber fires seeds in a pressurized jet that can send them roughly thirty feet away, without any animal's help.

broccoli

Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and kale are all the same wild plant, reshaped by farmers over thousands of years.

zucchini

A zucchini is really an immature summer squash, harvested young; left on the vine it swells into a giant marrow.

eggplant

Early European eggplants included small white fruits shaped like eggs, giving the vegetable a name that purple varieties still carry.

asparagus

Asparagus spears can grow several inches in a single day, and eating them makes some people's urine smell oddly sharp.

artichoke

An artichoke is an unopened flower bud; you eat the fleshy leaf bases and the tender heart before it blooms.

cauliflower

An orange cauliflower found among white plants in Canada helped breeders develop varieties containing the same pigment that gives carrots their color.

lettuce

Wild lettuce oozes a milky sap once used as a mild sleep aid; its Latin name comes from the word for milk.

parsnip

A parsnip looks like a pale carrot and grows sweeter after a frost, when its stored starch turns to sugar.

In their words