Vegetables of the Kitchen Garden, Oldest to Newest

Archaic period seed and rind fragments from Guilá Naquitz cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, were assigned to Cucurbita pepo, and the atlas records cultivation there between about 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, making the pumpkin the oldest crop on this path.

The atlas dates the bell pepper to roughly 7,000 years ago, citing finds in caves in Mexico, Peru and Ecuador; peppers are native to Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and northern South America, and seeds reached Spain in 1493.

Tomb paintings from ancient Egypt, about 6,500 years old, show a long-leaved lettuce and are the earliest known records of it as a cultivated vegetable, though scholars debate whether it was first domesticated in Egypt or in southwest Asia.

Cabbage was most likely domesticated somewhere in Europe before 1000 BC, with non-heading cabbages and kale probably the first forms; it is a cultivar of Brassica oleracea, a relative of broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts.

The artichoke is a domesticated variety of the wild cardoon, native to the Mediterranean, and the cardoon is mentioned as a garden plant by Homer and Hesiod in the eighth century BC; what is eaten is the flower bud, picked before it opens.

The pea is the seed, or sometimes the pod, of a cool-season annual, and the atlas places its earliest use around 500 BC; Linnaeus gave the species its scientific name in 1753, and botanically the pod is a fruit.

The first recorded use of cultivated celery as a food is in France in 1623; it was bred from a wild species into stalk celery, leaf celery and celeriac, and its seeds are used as a spice.

The atlas dates the zucchini to 1901, the youngest stop on the path; it is a summer squash picked while its rind and seeds are still soft, and although botanically a berry called a pepo, it is cooked as a vegetable.