We grow so many delicious food plants! Our criteria for selecting the varieties we grow and offer:
- Excellent flavor
- Adaptability to grow well in our area
- Disease resistance
The list is sorted alphabetically by kind of vegetable, and then variety name. Herbs are all together under “Herb”. Notes and explanations are after the list table. If you are on a desktop, you can type Ctrl F in the table and a little search box will pop up under the lower left corner of the table. Type in your search terms to quickly locate what you are looking for.
NOTES:
- F1 means a hybrid, saved seed won’t come true.
- OP means open-pollinated, seed will come true unless you grow other varieties nearby thus creating your own hybrids (very easy with squashes and tomatoes.)
- Heirloom means open-pollinated, and heirlooms have been maintained as distinct varieties for a long, long time—we’ll tell you if we know how many years.
- AAS means All America Selection prize winner. AAS winners are chosen each year (we include the year when known) for outstanding performance and adaptability to growing conditions in America.
About the tomatoes…so many tomatoes! We’ve tried to sort them into categories: the really big ones (Beefsteaks), Slicing tomatoes that fit nicely on a sandwich, Roma-paste-plum tomatoes…these are the meatier tomatoes that have less juice and cook down quicker into sauces, and small-fruited varieties like the cherries, grapes, pear, etc. Some tomatoes don’t fit any category nicely, so we put them into Unique. Some like Juliet fit into multiple categories—for example Juliet is a grape-sized Roma tomato that is one of the few that are Late Blight resistant. Frankly, we grow a couple of heirlooms that also resist Late Blight here: Principe Borghese, an Italian heirloom that is both a crack-resistant red cherry tomato and a meaty roma type—so meaty in fact that it was traditionally used as a drying tomato. Great flavor! We’ve also found the French heirloom Garden Peach (Peche Jaune) to have vigorous, healthy, Late Blight resistant vines. Garden Peach is truly Unique, it has a soft, slightly fuzzy yellowish-pink skin like a peach, and a complex, fruity flavor. Our other favorite heirlooms are Brandywine (of course) although it is late to ripen and variable in fruit size. Valencia is a delicious heirloom, earlier to ripen, uniform, and a rich yellowish orange color.
Speaking of heirlooms, Costata Romanesca zucchini has unbeatable flavor, although you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks longer for it than modern zucchini, and it is not quite as prolific either (not a bad trait for zucchini).
And speaking of squashes, if your Waltham Butternut squash tends to get powdery mildew before the squashes ripen, you really should try Little Dipper. It is practically the same size as Waltham and even more prolific, and the vigorous vines don’t seem to get powdery mildew right away, so most of the squashes ripen. They are excellent keepers and taste great too.
