Seed Order: 8 Vegetable Varieties To Try In 2015

As I mentioned on Facebook, I set aside last weekend to go through the seeds left from last season and to order new seeds for this year. Remember, some of the reasons I like to order seeds is so that I can:

• grow varieties that look great, but aren’t usually available in stores and nurseries locally.
• order early to make sure the seeds I want don’t run out.
• try new varieties each year, either new releases or just new to me, because there might me a vegetable that will do better in my garden that I don’t know about.

So along with my usual favorites (see the list at the end of the post), I ordered these new and new-to-me vegetables for the 2015 season from two sources, Pinetree Garden Seeds and Territorial Seed Company – unsurprisingly, new tomatoes sucked me in again and 5 of my 8 choices are tomatoes!

8 Vegetable Varieties to Try in 2015:

• Kentucky Wonder Wax Pole Bean. This is been around for awhile, but I’m trying it for the first time because I love growing pole beans and I want to add a yellow bean to my regular Emerite and Fortex beans.
• Atlantic Broccoli. I needed to find a new broccoli variety after last years bust with Arcadia (disappointing side-shoot production) and this promises a long harvest season with side shoots. I’ve found with the right variety I only need to plant broccoli once in the spring and the side shoots will keep us in plenty of broccoli all the way through fall.
• Purple Sun Carrot. This is new for 2015, and unlike two other purple carrots I’ve grown this is purple all the way through to the core. One of the fun things about growing your own food is growing unusual things – like completely purple carrots!
• Cabernet Grape Tomato. Although I only grow one grape tomato (they produce a TON), it’s actually been difficult for me to find a true grape tomato plant the last few years, so it’s back to growing my own.
• Tigerella Tomato. This is an early heirloom – two things that usually aren’t found together -tomato with a pretty striped skin.
• Blue Beauty Indigo Tomato. I’ve wanted to grow one of the indigo variety tomatoes ever since I saw them a few years ago. This is a slicer and I’m looking forward to growing this interesting colored tomato.
• Cordova Paste Tomato. After losing four paste tomato plants last year to blight, I’m growing mostly the two that made it (Roma and Polish Linguisa), plus this new one that I hope will prove able to withstand the inevitable blight we get in our wet springs.
• Sub Arctic Plenty Tomato. I’ve tried most of the ultra early tomato varieties and non are my absolute favorites, so I’m trying yet another in my effort to get early tomatoes.

Here are some of the other varieties I’ll be growing this year – my favorites that I grow every year (since it takes so much time to link the all the individual varieties, for these I’ll just list and if you’re interested, you can copy and paste into Google). Of course I think everyone should be growing these, too. 🙂

Tried-and-True Vegetable Varieties

• • Emerite pole beans
  • Fortex pole beans
  • Incredible sweet corn
  • Quickie corn
  • National Pickling cucumber
  • Tom Thumb butter lettuce
  • Jericho lettuce
  • Oregon Giant snow pea (after last year’s experiment with Carouby de Maussane snow pea – gorgeous blooms but sadly tough pods – I went back to a tried and true variety)

• Brandywine tomato
• Pineapple tomato
• Cherokee Purple tomato
• Black Cherry tomato
• about 7 varieties of cabbage: savoy, small, large, domed, pointed, personal size – we love our cabbage!

Please share any new or favorite varieties that you are looking forward to growing this year – I’d love to know!