Probably the most exotic thing I've grown that has made me "proud" would have been King Stropharia mushrooms aka Garden Giant mushrooms. I bought the spawn from Fungi Perfecti back in the 1990s, and then did a second planting a few years back after a prolonged drought seemed to take the first bed out. I've gotten some awesome, enormous mushrooms over the years, some of them easily the size of standard dinner plates. And, they have a great flavor, too.

Unfortunately, the more exotic some things are, the less they seem to impress the average person. I can wax on ecstatically about things I've grown, like litchi tomatoes, paw paws, Japanese sword beans, quinoa, or whatever, and the average person will just feign interest for a few moments until their eyes glaze over. That's one reason I enjoy Gardenweb so much -- it helps those of us who DON'T want to slit our wrists during lengthy conversations about Cornelian Cherry varieties or the pollination of persimmons come together in one place.

The strangest plant in my current collection is a large Theobroma cacao or chocolate tree, or maybe the Cherimoya tree. But neither of them fruit so the awe only comes from the stories I tell about them, not from any taste testing.

In the past the strangest plant I grew was Wasabi. Way out of zone and I really had to baby through our hot summers but I kept them alive for years and years.

I used to have a few pots of those Asian butterfly pea - Christia sp. a very striking plant but they only do well with extremely hot and humid weather.

I guess the oddest things I might grow (by this forum's area) would be my 11 cultivars of dragon fruit, cheirmoya, surinam cherries, passion fruit, and I am trying my hand at getting these cloudberry seeds to germinate.

@Triangle, do you hand pollinate your cherimoya? If not that is why you haven't had any fruit.

I've grown Hylocereus (not quite as big as Dragonfruit though) and kiwano, long ago, and a number of other oddities.

The hands-down oddest though, for which I had to search the world for seeds and finally found them in a Solanum germplasm collection, was cannibal tomato, the fruit that cannibals of the SW Pacific were said to use in their BBQ sauce for their hideous "long pork" feasts. You would have to be familiar with the south and BBQ to know the degree of fanaticism with it here and I just knew that a sauce with cannibal tomato would be a clever gimmick. They grew and fruited fine. Unfortunately they tasted much more like their eggplant relatives than their tomato relatives and the venture was a failure.

Solanum anthropophageum (note the specific epithet). Found in a collection in France, former colonial power over Fiji, and held in relation to germplasm for the vastly important potato, tomato, and egplant crops.

Yeah, I grew those in 2010 from Baker Creek seeds. I didn't try to eat them, though, since the catalog said they were very bitter. The plant basically looked like a Turkish Orange type eggplant.

Maybe it's like Soylent Cola -- the taste varies from person to person.

If you have two different Akebia vines they will fruit. Inside is an easily detached, large, elongated, transversely ribbed, firm pulp in which you can clearly see the matchhead-sized black seeds. My son would take them with lunch to middle school where he would announce at the cafeteria table that they were "tick-eating death worms" before offering them around and munching away.

"The nut doesn't fall . . . ."

Okay, those Akebia are definitely freaky, I love 'em.

Growing your own chocolate tree sounds awesome though, but I'd assume as a more tropical plant it wouldn't exactly be hardy for my zone. Oh well.

One thing that caught my eye though, growing your own wasabi? I thought that stuff required some fairly strict environments to grow (like very cold constantly moving streams), how did you manage to grow it at home?

Edymnion - I found Wasabi to be easy to grow in a pot with the soil kept damp. When our air was dryer I would sit the pot in a shallow tub of water but most of the time we have damp air. If the daytime high was over 85 I would shove the pot under the house and leave the crawlspace door open. The temps were always much cooler. You could probably grow it as a house plant. It likes low light. You'd just have to keep it damp. I think the stream culture is just to improve flavor. My clump was big enough to harvest but I never did.

The chocolate tree was given to me as a tiny seedling. They are kinda tricky (like high humidity and warm temps) but for some reason this one plant has survived for years. I used to bring it indoors in the winter. The dry air will normally kill them but this one just kept on growing. Now it is too big to move in and out so it stays in my makeshift greenhouse. So far I have been able to keep the temps warm but we are only half way through the winter.

Both the chocolate and the cherimoya are just now big enough to bloom.

I just might have to try growing wasabi then. I love eating the stuff, but I hate the high price you get on the real thing (often $5+ for the thinnest sliver).

If you're ever at a fancy asian resteraunt, always ask if the wasabi is fresh, or if its from powder. Or worse yet, if its just horse radish and mustard. The fresh stuff is divine.

I have a cherimoya in a pot as well (actually two) I started from seed a few years back. The larger one had a half dozen flowers on it this Spring, but the smaller didn't bloom so there was nothing to cross pollinate. The flowers were small compared to a paw paw. When the narrow petals dropped, the little pistils persisted for a few days just to give a false hope that the fruit may have set. Maybe this year both will flower and I can try hand pollinating.

I don't know if any cultivars of Cheri require cross pollination, that just gives you different fruit. What you have to do is collect pollen when it's in the male stage and apply it to flowers opening for the female stage.

The reason why it's rare/near impossible for it to naturally pollinate in the US is that the beetle that does it isn't native to us.

Here is a link on how to do it...

Here is a link that might be useful: How to pollinate.

Thanks, wizard, for the link. Hope to have a chance to try it this year. I wouldn't have thought the female stage would be closed. I was assuming it would be more like the paw paw.

I just picked up some Sugar Cane at the farmer's market Sunday--does that count as strange???

Carla in Sac

Oh, I forgot that I planted sugar cane last year (from cuttings) and I totally forgot about them since they won't surface until later.

Sugar Cane is fun because it gives you an excuse to use a machete in the garden

I've got a plant that was called "Cuban Oregano" - it smells like oregano to some degree but it has thick watery leaves like a succulent. I entered it in the county fair here in Eastern Kansas and no one had ever seen it before. Grows like mad and will root in a jar of water in just a couple days. I've had plants rooted from the original for 15 years now.

We have several of the red-fleshed apples and they always cause a bit of a shock. Sometimes kids think that their gums are bleeding!

I have a jaboticaba in a 25 gallon pot that fruits by cauliflory (from branch wood directly) with fruit that looks and eats like large grapes.

I used to have a Turk's Turban cactus that occasionally gave some small fruit.

I've grown narajilla (an Andean fruit) and Florida Cranberry (a hibiscus relative whose Latin name and other common name escape me at the moment; you eat the fruity enlarged calyxes, though usually as jelly). These were grown as annuals.

Growing your own sugar cane sounds like fun. Wrong zone for year round here, but how long does it take to grow to eating size? If I could get a stalk or two big enough to be worth the effort in a single season, I might have to get some of that.

I've started sugar cane cuttings in April, transplanted outside in late May, and had the plants reach 6-7 feet tall with canes about an inch in diameter at the base by autumn. Treat it just like corn and it does fine.

The hardest part I've found is getting fresh, healthy canes that will sprout. A lot of them in the markets are kind of sad looking, and I think that they are held in cold storage and that must cause chilling injury that ruins many of them. I've found that more of them will rot than root, so my advice is to buy several pieces, preferably from different sources, to try to maximize success. Use a rooting hormone/fungicide powder and sprout them using bottom heat for best chance of success.

If you like to nibble on fresh sugar cane, an alternative is to grow sweet sorghum, which is grown just like corn as well.

Will do. I found some blue sugar cane on ebay that looks promising, ordered a couple sticks of it. Says its good as a chewing cane or a syrup cane, which are the two uses I'd have for it, so I'm going to give it a try.

Can you post the link to the blue cane, I'm always looking to expand my collection.

For canes you normally plant in october/november, and next november (might take longer when it's the first canes from a seed cane) you will get sugar cane that is sweet.

I do not have anything like what you have.
I know what Dragon fruit is, but no greenhouse, yet.
I was told two weeks ago to buy the sugar cane & lay it in a trench 12 -16 inches deep until Spring, but I may be able to put a few roots in a pot, til Spring.
I have a 75 year old pineapple pear, a wonder Pomegranate, 3 figs,one is yellow. A black walnut,butternut,pineapple guava (Feijoa Collidge),Japanese Persimmon,Opuntia cactus( yellow flower), & pineapples from store bought tops.

That seems a bit deep, that being said, all my advice comes from CA/FL growers. Since we don't get as cold, we may be able to get away with 3-4 inches deep.

I've tried growing pineapples from tops but they never seem to take root. I am not sure if it's simply that it's so dry here or what (I've yet to propogate a plant from cuttings).

Yeah, planting sugar cane outdoors here in November would be a waste of effort. Well, most years it would be anyway, as we usually have at least a week or two where the temperature never gets above freezing, and can go down to single digits on occasion. Everything I've read basically says sugar can simply will not tolerate even a light freeze, much less a deep hard one.

Going to put these in a large container indoors soon as they come in and hope for the best.

I'm assuming they won't do well if left in containers, so I'll get them out in the yard as soon as we pass the last frost date for the area.

Link to what I ordered is below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Sugar Cane Auction

You can keep sugar cane in pots/containers with little issue. The only real drawback is that they won't grow as large. When I got my first plant (before using cane cuttings) was grown in a pot. They actually make really pretty plants.

I'll chime in with something, just because it was not mentioned yet, and I don't think many others are growing it: Garambullo, or whortleberry cactus, a large columnar species from Mexico with delicious bluebberry-like fruit.

It occurs to me that there are also some things I've grown that are quite common in our lives, but not often encountered in the backyard garden or home windowsill. These include:
-- garbanzos
-- cotton
-- stevia
-- lemongrass
-- curry
-- stinging nettle
-- winebery

Lastly, I think my ultimate weird plant to grow would be Miracle Fruit. So far I've balked at the high prices and slow growth rate of this plant, but even a dozen berries per year would be enough for a nice miracle fruit party!

I have a miracle fruit seedling, actually.

Biggest thing is do *NOT* buy seeds, but seedlings or small plants.

Unlike most plants we're accustomed to as gardeners, the seeds of the miracle fruit only stay viable for a week or two after the fruit is picked. If you don't get them started within a few days of picking, you're probably not going to get anything.

Below is the place I got my seedling from. It took a couple of months to settle in after I transferred it (came as a bare root seedling, he grows them hydroponically), but its really starting to take off now (and by take off, I mean its put out all of 2 leaves since last October, but they've both been in the last month or so).

Good customer service too, I'd highly recommend him if you want to get your own plant. It'll run you about $12 after shipping to get a 6 month old seedling, but after that you're set. Be a couple years before you get any fruit out of it though (but then, when was the last time you ever got any kind of fruit plant that wasn't a pepper or tomato that produced fruit the first year?)

Here is a link that might be useful: Ethan's Garden Miracle Fruit Seedling

Okay, I live in the north, so my palette is limited. Most of the fruit trees that grow around here are easily recognized. The small fruits are too, well, small. Lots of people have raspberies, strawberries, currants and so on. The plants in my garden that have gotten the most comments are lovage in full bloom and Jupiter's Beard. For people to notice it has to be showy, different, and big. People do ask "What herb is that?" sometimes, but not too often. Jupiter's Beard and Missouri Evening Primrose win. One person asked about my European Elderberry when it was blooming once.

Just got my blue sugar cane in today. The seed cane segments were almost as thick as my wrist. Got them in some indoor long containers to start rooting until I'm sure this abnormal weather is going to STAY warm enough to put stuff outside in the ground.

Heh, just finished tilling my normal garden spot, mixing in fresh garden soil, etc. I must have been extra lazy this winter, tilling up that 8'x12' bed with my mattock wore my butt out! Oh well, it should have at least a month or two to "soak in" before the plants go in.

Cool, we will have to trade cuttings if our crops come in and are ready to harvest in October.

Sure thing.

They're supposed to produce prolific amounts of seed (I've actually read some rough studies of using sugarcane seed as a grain it makes so much), and that the seeds are perfectly viable, so that'll be good.

I'm also going to order some wasabi plants. =)

I did not know they produced seeds until you mentioned it. I'll have to keep an eye on them just to make sure I don't end up with a yard full of plants. That would wear out my machete arm fast. I just assumed that the way the cane reproduced was via fallen canes (as the way you got yours).

Just out of curiosity, what did your segments look like? My cuttings came in 10-12 inch sections.

I am curious to try and grow wasabi, what are the growing criteria?

Yup, sugar cane grows from seed quite readily. When they get big, watch for a fluffy tuft on the tops, like you'd see on some wild grass. One article I was reading about someone growing them in the midwest said he started with 10 seeds from a supplier and ended up with 3 ounces of seed by the end of the season.

As for what they looked like:
{{gwi:57791}}

Took it with my iphone, they were more purple in person.

From what I've read so far, the main things for growing wasabi are temperature (keep it in the 60-70 degree range), light (they like full shade), and water (keep them wet). Any good organic rich soil thats kept wet appears to be sufficient for them, and the temperature and lighting requirements seem perfect for indoors (it even said that unless its a north facing window, don't even put them in a windowsill).

So sort of like lucky bamboo it seems, just with more organic matter.

Ah that is good to know, I will havest the seeds from them too, just in case.

I will look into growing wasabi too, I always thought it needed to be grown in almost swampy land from the way people would talk about it.

wizzard419, the whole Sugar Cane stalk is buried to keep it from freezing, in Spring, dig it up & cut in pieces like in edymnion photo to root them.
The pineapple tops should have a little apple flesh on it.
You pull the flesh off & any dead leaves.
At this point my son puts them in a large mouth quart jar until it roots, then pot up.
I always put the rootless top in potting soil until it roots.
But my son has had good luck with his in water, so that is the way I do it now.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pineapple

That's actually how I got mine, I put them in the ground (under a few inches of mulch/compost) in october (freezing isn't an issue in So Cal) and they have put out a ton of roots. Their expected emergence isn't for a few months.

With pineapple, I've tried both the water and potting soil methods (trimed off dead leaves, left some flesh, etc.) and I never get any roots. I'm guessing that the crazy dryness here isn't helping much.

Hot dang, finally found a reputable looking place that sells wasabi plants. First (and for the longest only) place I found with them was Richter's, but something about them set off warning bells in my head. Cheap looking site, high minimum order, extremely vague shipping times, etc, just didn't look good to me.

After throwing all of my google-fu at the problem, I finally found Horizon Herbs. No minimum order, and their wasabi plants are significantly cheaper.

Got two plants on order for as soon as they become available.

Cool, tell me how they turn out and I may plant them next year, or later this year.

Edymnion, I know many people who love both Richter & Horizon for the Herb seeds(it is a herb forum).
But I have not ordered plants from them.
Please let us know how they do, pic are good.

I have mamone seeds from Central America.

My kiwano is going strong!

{{gwi:57792}}

Added a few pictures of what the fruit looks like I stole... I mean borrowed from Google so people will have some idea what it is.

"Strangest".... That's pretty funny, as I am the only one in my entire neighborhood that grows *ANY* fruit at all.... The neighbors look at me like I am some sort of anachronism for growing a little garden and some fruit trees....

But... The "Strangest" of all the common stuff I have is a cider pear, a Citation Rootstock peach/plum that had the graft die, an American Purple plum seedling, and a roadside dug-up seedling peach.

My Purple and black tomatoes probably classify as what folks around here think is weirdest... They look and say "But... It's rotten!"

On the sugar cane thing - if you poke around and ask the old timers at the feed stores - you will find that most farm families in the Deep South used to raise their own sugar cane for sweetening things.... As Jolji said - you bury them over the winter, then dig them up and plant them shallow after Easter...

This year, I want a Jujube and a couple filberts...

In years past - people expressed wonderment at my Vanilla orchids...

Thanks

Yup, my hometown is apparently quite well known amongst sugar cane growers the world over. Seems the Chattanooga #12 cane mill was one of if not the most common cane mills in the world. Seems every time I see a picture of a big cane mill in Jamaica, or asia, or wherever else, it says Chattanooga on the side of it.