Nancy has an above-ground garden on the patio and has grown lots of delicious vegetables over the past few years. Because the soil is warmer, her tomatoes come in earlier than mine and she truly has a green thumb when it comes to growing peppers. This year, she said she’d like to plant some turnips and bought a package of what she thought were turnip seeds at the nursery last week. The front of the seed package certainly looked like turnips.
But they weren’t. They were rutabagas.
Turnips and rutabagas are both root vegetables in the Brassica family, with turnips generally smaller, white-fleshed, and peppery, while rutabagas are larger, yellow-fleshed, sweeter hybrids of turnips and cabbage. Rutabagas often have a waxy coating and yellowish-brown skin, whereas turnips are usually white with purple tops. They are high in fiber and low in calories and a good source of quite healthy with lots of calcium, potassium, vitamin B6 and vitamin C.
I haven’t had rutabagas in years, though Daddy used to grow them often in his garden. I actually prefer rutabagas to turnips, as they are much sweeter and more pleasant tasting. We often had them in a dish that resembled mashed potatoes.
Despite picking up the wrong seeds, Nancy decided to plant anyway and calls them her Rut-a-Baby patch. They should be ripe in a couple months, and I look forward to a big bowl of mashed Rut-a-Babies
