Introduction

Abstract

The world is endowed with a rich, natural bio­diversity of flora and fauna species. Over 7,000 plant species have been recorded to be edible today. Unfortunately only a meager number of these are cultivated widely or used on a large, extensive scale. Those cultivated commercially on a wide scale include crops like maize, rice, wheat, oats and potatoes. Others also cultivated widely and commercially but on smaller scales includes both vegetables like cabbages, broccoli, garlic, onions, capsicums and fruit crops like apples, oranges, grapes, mango, banana and pineapple. The predominance of a dozen or two of such commodities and widely grown crops have captured the attention of global research and development resources and efforts because of their significance in food production, food supply, food security and international food trade. These have resulted in the voluminous information generated and published on all aspects of these crops. Not so for many of the lesser known edible crops especially those indigenous vegetables and fruit that are harvested from the wild in the bush, forest, jungle or from a wide array of anthropogenic environments commensal with farming. These include wastelands, fallow fields, boundaries, roadsides, waysides, irrigation canal edges, river banks, stream sides, ponds, swamps, trenches and gullies as well as those grown as backyard crops. Many of these crops are perishable, low yielding and their value as commercial crops has not been explored. Comparatively, little research has been conducted because of their lack of commercial importance and whatever little published information available are found scattered in many cases in obscure, local publication sources.