For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s All About Organics page.

Chris Cavendish holds an uprooted ginger plant at Fishbowl Farm in Bowdoinham.
Whitney Hayward/Staff Photographer

Lots of farmers like to experiment occasionally, growing the odd fruit or vegetable that doesn’t really belong in Maine just to see if they can.

Take Deborah Chadbourne of Rasmussen Farm & Western Maine Market in Freeman Township. In recent years she’s tried her hand at growing turmeric, ginger, cardamom, lemongrass and cardoon.

“It’s winter, you’re stuck in the house, and all these seed catalogs come,” she said. “There are all these exciting things and you’ve never heard of them. You say, ‘Let’s try that’ and then the package arrives and you have to figure out what to do with it and where to plant it and how to eat it, if it actually grows.”

Chadbourne’s experiments rarely make it far, although she is particularly proud of the five artichokes she managed to coax from a single plant this year (out of 30 she planted last year). Not enough to sell, but “I’m tempted to take a couple to the farmers market just to show off.”

Others have better success. After a few years of trials, they have enough vegetables to sell at farmers markets or to restaurants, and they find themselves with an unconventional new crop. Here’s a look at seven unusual crops farmers are growing here in Maine:

PEANUTS

Peanuts belong in Georgia, not Maine – right?

Wrong.

Pete and Cathy Karonis, owners of Fairwinds Farm in Topsham and Bowdoinham, grow Virginia Jumbos – the kind you find in a jar of Planters – and Valencias, the small Spanish peanut with a red skin.

“I grew up in the South and always had a garden,” Pete Karonis explained. “We grew peanuts down there, and I said, ‘Well shoot, why can’t we grow them up here?’ We experimented for a couple of years trying to get the procedures down right because the timing is critical in several stages of peanut growth, and we think we’ve got it figured out now.”