Gardening: Forgotten veges back on the plate

TURNING GREEN: Our hero-worship of guacamole in the 70s may have led to the popularity of green bathrooms and kitchen appliances.

Make sure you're ready to plant the must-have vegetables of the season

Since it's spring and we're likely all focused on what vegetables we're growing this season, it's not a bad time to look back on what's been trendy over the past few decades. Who knows, what we worshipped years ago may just be coming back into fashion, so it'd pay to get some in the ground.

In the 70s, it was the avocado. First it was just the fruit, then it was guacamole, and then it was green handbasins, toilets and kitchen appliances.

In the 80s, it was beets. Apparently we can blame this on Austrian-born American celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, who paired them with goat's cheese. Interestingly, this inspired colour combination did not inspire a decade of toilets and toasters.

Another great 80s fad was the sun-dried tomato. When we were over their over-the-top, punchy taste, we cottoned on to semi sundried tomatoes. Later, slow-roasted tomatoes won the day.

In the 90s we met arugula, followed by asparagus that went from the garden to the plate without going in a tin, and portobello mushrooms, which, despite appearance, did not taste like fillet steak.

In 2010, Brussels sprouts changed from being a punishment to a treat merely by the introduction of bacon. Roasted together, drizzled with oil and sprinkled with pine nuts, they were really quite bearable. In the United States, restaurants and food trucks were deep-frying them as a trendy snack or side dish.

Shortly after, our affair with heirloom carrots began. Different names, colours and textures moved them from simple to sexy - for a while.

In 2012 we had to grow and eat kale - sauteed, raw in salads, roasted as chips and - gulp - in smoothies.

But that's over now. Approaching 2015, food-trend watchers have named cauliflower as the new kale. Cauliflower is low in calories and fat, high in protein and fibre. You don't have to boil it - you can roast, saute, steam, mash or eat it raw. You can now buy orange ones, which have 25 per cent more vitamin A than white ones, and purple ones, which contain the antioxidant group anthocyanins, also be found in red cabbage and red wine.

Thanks in part to the gluten-free trend, ancient grains like amaranth, quinoa, buckwheat, millet, and teff are terribly trendy now. They're called "ancient" because they've been around, unchanged, for about 1000 years, but I suspect the marketers have been cultivating the term and the image to further enhance their desirability.