In my work this year as a relief music teacher working across primary and high schools, I have come across the concept of vegetable rhythms and even though they are aimed at children from the ages of 5 to 8, I think that whoever came up with the concept was really rather clever.
Vegetable rhythms are based off the rhythm certain vegetable names (and one fruit!) that the way they are pronounced has a certain rhythm. So here are the main ones I have come across:
The way this is used is getting little kids to practice clapping as they say these vegetable names, so that they can associate the vegetable names with a written rhythm. If you struggle with getting your timing correct in a piece of music, you could use these vegetable names to help you. How you could do this is if your had 4 semiquavers (sixteenth notes) together, then you could lightly pencil in the word ‘cauliflower’ either directly above or directly underneath the notes , so that when you get to those notes you could either say the word in your head or out loud.
If you think that this unusual method might be a way to help cement the feel of these particular rhythmic patterns, then feel free to put the names of the vegetables all over your music.
Even though I have not had the opportunity to try this with any of my own piano students, I can definitely see this working.
There are a few you tube clips available that are admittedly made for kids, but for adults that really struggle to get their timing of the notes accurate, this could be helpful to you. Here’s one I am familiar with:
youtube.com/watch?v=KhJ1ONEVVCQ&t=39s
Yes it is simple, but if you really need help you could practice using this clip and then maybe going to the bother of practicing by just clapping the various vegetable names while looking at the particular rhythmic pattern. The part of looking at the written pattern while clapping it, will help in absorbing what each pattern looks like. It might be a bit of an unorthodox approach, but I’m confident it will work.
It is important to note that I have not come up with this, truth be told, I’m not sure who did, but if you happen to know who it is , please send me a message and I’ll update this article giving full credit to whoever it is!