Biographies of 76 vegetables with detailed accounts of how
to grow them, their climate of origin, their transformation
over time, and their nutritional and therapeutic potential

Joel Morrow began writing down his vegetable "biographies"--scribbled in the margins of a planting calendar--when his first garden teacher, Margareta Leuder, "described how as a child she had raised watermelon in the Sonoran desert in 1905."

In the 1980s, Joel became editor of the journal Biodynamics. In it, he began his interviews with vegetables, which have continued for...