This may sound silly, but I'm thrilled to grow unusually-colored vegetables.1 Sometimes, especially in the case of normally-green vegetables, it makes harvesting ever so much easier. Snap beans striped with purple and yellow; blue-podded peas; yellow squash; because they're easier to see, I'm less likely to end up with oversized - and then often less than desirable - vegetables. There are some who like their zucchini bigger than a baseball bat, I guess, though I can't imagine why.
Picking a golden-podded pea or purple bean runs the risk of growing something that looks good, but is lacking in taste, or texture, or what have you. It happens, though I seem to have dodged the bullet this year. Golden peas? Genuinely excellent. Blue-podded peas are also good, enough that I'll grow them again. And as for those Sugar Snap peas?
They're delicious, but in an odd position. Syngenta's PVP has run out, and it seems that seed quality is in decline. The upside? Anyone can produce and sell the seed these days. The downside? For a while, at least, finding reliable seed's going to be tough. So... the 2010 catalogs may need some careful perusal. Perhaps 2010 is the year for experimenting with Cascadia, or Amish Snap, or something else.
Until then, however, I've got many, many fresh peas to enjoy. Fresh, multicolored peas:
Extra bonus: I can pick peas into just one bowl, without worry that I'll mix up those with edible pods and those without.
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1Fruits, too, like yellow or orange raspberries, but they're more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to play around with.
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