Ö÷²¥´óÐã

Do you know your yacon from your oca? Have you wondered if it's possible to grow your own water chestnuts? And what exactly are Buddha's fingers anyway?

Colocasia esculenta or taro

I have to admit to a secret obsession with exotic veg. It all began with a few sweet potatoes in a tub: and now I've got tomatilloes in the greenhouse, a yacon root in my jungle garden and an order in for some taro – I know it as Colocasia esculenta – which I hope will drape elegantly over my pond all summer before I eat its roots (if I can bear to: this is a seriously gorgeous plant) cooked like potatoes next autumn.

I'm not the only one, either. recommends achocha (like teardrop-shaped beans, apparently) and the delicious-sounding Japanese wineberry; and Mark Diacono's is entirely dedicated to finding out what far-flung fruits will grow here. So far he's managed olives, pecan nuts, guavas and Szechuan peppers. As if that wasn't enough, there are now , and Aberglasney in Carmarthenshire is making ice cream out of its . There's change afoot in our veg gardens, and all those cabbages, leeks and runner beans are beginning to look decidedly old-fashioned.

So I'm fascinated by s latest project to collect the seed from so-called 'exotics' brought to the UK over the last 40 years as people from Asia and the Caribbean settled here and started growing their equivalent of carrots and spuds in allotments and gardens.

The project, called '', has spent the summer scouring allotments all over the Midlands collecting not just samples of plants to grow on, but also gardening lore handed down from generation to generation on how best to cultivate them.

Sally Cunningham, who runs the project, Ìý that what they found didn't always taste that great – the word 'mucilaginous' used to describe chayote leaves hardly whets the appetite – and she's been having trouble working out what some of them are from the description 'it's a bean that tastes really good'. But hers is a job I covet: just imagine getting to plant mystery seeds every day just to see what comes up.

Amaranth

The extraordinary thing is that over the years strains of, say, callaloo (Amaranthus sp.) from Jamaica and Bangladesh have adapted to UK conditions – so now the plants growing in those Birmingham allotments put up with cooler weather and a shorter growing season than the ones back home.

You can see the fruits of their labours (pun entirely intended, I'm afraid) tomorrow, Sunday 3^rd October, at the first-ever at Ryton Gardens, Garden Organic's Warwickshire show garden: and that's where you'll find all the answers to the questions above, as well as getting to eat them and learning how to grow them. Your veg garden may never be the same again.

Sally Nex is a garden writer and blogger and part of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Gardening team.