Plants 101 - 6 Vegetables that are actually the same plant!

Six vegetables you can find in any grocery store and which most people eat on a regular basis are actually all from this one plant. Over the last few thousand years, farmers have bred Brassica Oleracea into six "cultivars" that eventually became many of the vegetables we eat:

Brassica is also known as the wild mustard plant.

"The wild plant is a weedy little herb that prefers to grow on limestone outcroppings all around the coastal Mediterranean region," Jeanne Osnas, a researcher at Purdue University who blogs as "The Botanist in the Kitchen," writes in a blog post about Brassica Oleracea. "It is a biennial plant that uses food reserves stored over the winter in its rosette of leaves to produce a spike of a few yellow flowers at the end of its second summer before dying. Those nutritious leaves make its domesticated derivatives important food crops in much of the world now."

This one plant was selectively bred over hundreds of years to create dozens of wildly different vegetables. By selecting and breeding plants with bigger leaves, or larger buds, the different cultivars (also known as subspecies) were created.

Source: Skye Gould/Tech Insider