Favorites and Rejects: Part 2 - Favorites

I feel like I should keep trying different varieties, because there might be something better out there than the ones I know I like.  I'm having the same dilemma that I have at restaurants:  I feel like I should try an alternate option than the one I had before, but I know I like that.

In the tomato world, I do keep trying different varieties.  I think the reason I'm able to do that with tomatoes is that I plan on always planting at least four varieties, for...er...variety.  So my current favorites are only that - current.  They could easily change.

Having said that, I've already been planting Golden Jubilee since the first year, and it would take something truly spectacular to knock that off my favorites list.  It's a yellow tomato that's very flavorful and neither too tart nor too sweet for my taste.

Another tomato that I just planted this year immediately making my list is Missouri Pink Love Apple.  When it starts to ripen, it does indeed look pink.  Once it gets very ripe, it looks red, but it's not that deep red of red tomatoes.  It's delicious.

I should add here that when I started growing tomatoes, I read some articles with tips for growing, harvesting and storing, where I learned that for heirloom tomatoes, you should not wait until they look completely colored on the vine to pick them, but once they're somewhat colored up, you should feel them, and when they start to give to a little pressure, they're ripe.  If you wait until they're fully colored, they're overripe.  When I pick them, I usually let them sit for a day or two which colors them up.  I could probably just leave them on the vine a day or two longer, but the first year, when I did that, I found that some critter would usually decide the night before I wanted to pick them that they were indeed perfectly ripe and take a few bites out of them.  Someone told me that was how her father told her you'd know when your tomatoes are ripe: the raccoons will eat them.

I'm currently also testing Old Italian and Brave General, two red varieties.  I'll have to get back to you on those.

The first year, I planted Golden Zucchini with seeds I got from Baker Creek Seeds.  The plants were huge, and the fruits were delicious.  I picked them small and used a vegetable peeler to slice them up over plates of spaghetti and topped it all with parmesan cheese.  That was good.  I also sliced them that way into green salads.  Good as well.  Sauteed with onion - mmmmmm.

The fruits and flowers were a beautiful, dark, golden yellow color.  The squash bugs liked them a lot, too.  Periodically, I would go out and lift leaves from the ground and stomp hundreds of little babies.  I know.  Cold blooded.  But squash bugs are as fecund as aphids.  You can't just let them go, or you'll be overrun.

At first, I thought the yellow leaves were a sign of a nutritional problem, but they seemed quite healthy, and after reading a comment on the Baker Creek Seeds site, I guess some of them will just be that color.  Some leaves were a solid, bright green and some of them were silvery with green splotches.  Or maybe that's green with silvery splotches.  It's a very interesting looking plant.  And did I mention it gets huge?

I saw another comment at Baker Creek Seeds from someone saying he grew these in tomato cages.  I might try that.  It would limit their sprawling into my garden pathways.  I failed to order seeds this year and ended up buying a similar squash called Gold Rush at Morgan County Seeds, an Amish store about an hour south of me.  The plants were vigorous, and the leaves were a darker green and the fruit was a paler yellow than Golden Zucchini.  Alas, more of it rotted and died while small than stayed healthy long enough to harvest.  Then the plants started dying off.  It was either too wet this year, or I've got a soil fungus in that plot.  I really hope not.  I guess it could have been the bugs, but there weren't yet very many of them - maybe squash vine borers that I didn't see.  I just pulled out the last plant a couple of days ago.  I'll have to investigate more closely if it happens next year.  They were gorgeous for a while.

The fruits weren't as pretty as Golden Zucchini, so next year I'm going back to that.

I didn't plant any cowpeas (black-eyed peas) this year because I ran out of space, but I did plant them in 2015.  The flavor was similar with all three varieties I planted, but I have to warn you that the black beans bleed, so if you grow them, rinse them very well in  hot water or cook them separately from any others or you'll end up with a gray and very unappetizing dish.  It will taste good if you can manage to bring yourself to put it in your mouth, but you might not want to serve it to company.  A neighbor told me to cook them with onion and bacon, and boy was that ever delicious.  The three varieties I grew were California Blackeye, Pinkeye, and Black Crowder (the black one).

I've planted a few varieties of okra, and my favorites are the red because their leaves are a deep dark green and the stems and fruits are a dark red.  They do turn green when you cook them, sadly, but that's really not a problem since they don't sit around on the plate very long in this house.  

The first year, I  planted Jing Orange (a red variety), Midget Cowhorn and Clemson  Spineless.  The Jing Orange was pretty, but none of them was otherwise outstanding.

The second year, I tried three red varieties, having decided I didn't need to bother with the green: Burgundy, Bowling Red and Red Velvet.  Burgundy had very poor germination, and I marked it off my list.  This year, I didn't order my seed and instead bought it at Morgan County Seeds, and the only red they had was Burgundy.  I bought it and planted it more densely - which was very dense indeed - and if it didn't have 100% germination, it was very close.  So - who knows?  The seed?  The weather?  At any rate, it's all good.  I think any of the reds I've tried would be okay.

I planted some peas the first year, and none of them did anything. For one thing, I didn't have a garden spot for them, I just planted some on a couple of trellises at the edges.  One trellis was under a building eave, and the rain that poured off that drowned anything there.  I don't know what the problem was with the other, but I have a neighbor who said her peas did nothing that year, too.

The following year, I decided to try a little harder on the peas and put up a garden net between two bamboo poles for them to grow on.  I planted Sugar Snap and Wando, which were peas I'd bought the year before and had left over, so that probably wasn't very smart.  Make extra work to plant seeds that might not be any good.

They all did germinate and grow, though, and I crossed Wando off my list, but didn't indicate why.  I think it was because the Sugar Snap were so sweet and tasty in comparison, but I really can't recall.

This year, I had a great idea for my peas that didn't exactly work out.  I'd left the old okra stalks in the ground all winter just for something to look at.  A few of them were over ten feet tall.  They seemed sturdy, but I didn't know how heavy lush pea vines might get.  Still, I thought it was a worth a try to plant them amongst those stalks.  And I planted very, very densely.

This time, I planted Sugar Snap and Green Arrow, a bushier type, which had long pods filled with up to ten peas.  Green Arrow, being a bushier type plant, held itself up a little better, but Sugar Snap just wallowed on the ground.  Wimps.  The peas I got from both varieties were good, Sugar Snap being much sweeter, but I had to dig for them, because the plants climbed all over themselves and reached no higher than my knees.  It might have been a successful experiment had it not been for the heavy rains we had and the fact that the cat kept using the dry okra stalks for scratching posts and shredded them.  For next year, I have another idea.

I plant some chili and jalapeno peppers each year.  They've always been okay, but my favorite peppers are the mini bells that I call snackers.  You can buy them in the grocery stores, but they're better fresh, of course.  I don't bother looking for packaged seeds; I just scrape the ones out of the peppers in the store.  Turns out you can plant them immediately or dry and store them.  Either way works.

One last mention:

Tatsoi - wonderful salad green.  I tried this for the first time this year - in fact, I'd not heard of it before.  I purchased the seed at Morgan County.  It's an excellent salad green, but I most often just grazed on it directly out of the garden while I was working.  A little bunch of baby leaves wrapped with an arugula leaf is soooo tasty; juicy broccoli-like taste with a peppery coating.  This is it on the right getting ready to bolt:

What are your favorite varieties to plant, and why?

May you always have happy gardening and good eats.