For most of us, this is an exciting time of year. Frost has come and our outdoor growing has definitely slowed down. We can breathe a little and take stock of our successes and challenges in the past growing season. Meals are once again sit-down and on time. We have the leisure to actually talk to people about something other than growing, take in a movie or concert, go (gasp!) on a vacation or to a conference. And, most exciting, those repositories of possibilities, seed catalogs, have started to arrive.

I don’t know about all growers, but in our household, new seed catalogs are snatched up as soon as they hit the mailbox. They are so addictive! Much more desirable than any other type of catalog that comes to our farm. Whoever gets his/her hands on them first hoards them for evening reading. And if we have two new ones at once, and each of us has one to read, neither of us can get far reading before the interruption: “Hey, listen to this!! We have to grow this next year!!”

Funny, no matter how good – or bad – the growing season just ended was, we are ready, indeed anxious, to start a new one, complete with new, different, wonderfully exciting varieties.

So, for this time of the year, we’d like to share some varieties that were new, or were new to us, that we tried this past season – and what we thought about them.

Cherry tomatoes are an important part of our summer marketing. We market them as mixed pints containing as many as 12 varieties. We want lots of different shapes, colors and tastes to intrigue the shopper. So we trial new varieties each year, striving to improve on our product. Some of the standouts this year are: Sun Sugar as a replacement for Sun Gold. In our field, it was indeed much more crack resistant than Sun Gold, and just as tasty. Black Cherry from Tomato Growers Supply Company had good disease resistance, good production, nice taste and was a beautiful dark brown/purple. It has a permanent place in our mix. Pink Cherry also from Tomato Growers. We’ve been looking for a good round, pink cherry and this one made the cut. Beam’s Yellow Pear from Seed Savers’ Exchange is a much more crack resistant yellow pear – and an heirloom. We were disappointed in Johnny’s yellow grape, Golden Sweet, but mostly because it doesn’t ripen with Sweet Olive and Chiquita – its taste and productivity are great and we may work a little more on timing for it. And, finally, we trialed a new variety from Johnny’s, Tomato Berry. We got it out a little late in our fall planting and frost stopped it, but it has real possibilities. It’s heart shaped, red, has good taste, is really productive and in our fall, looked good for disease resistance.

This year, we wanted to do a similar thing with paste tomatoes. To that end, we grew a San Marzano 168, an F1 hybrid, Striped Roman and Italian Gold. The San Marzano was wonderfully uniform and productive. The striped Roman was very disease prone and the fruits were not uniformly paste tomato shaped. They ranged from almost round to long and thin. The Italian Gold, which we have grown before and loved, turned out to be a yellow slicer that looked a lot like Husky Gold – what a disappointment! If anyone knows a source for Italian Gold, a hybrid, determinate, gold, paste-type tomato, let us know. Otherwise, we’ll just go back to growing one red paste tomato.

Summer squash are always important for our market shoppers. We have been growing Zephyr from Johnny’s for years. It is so distinctive in our market display and really good tasting as well. For whatever reason, no one else at our market grows it, so it sets us apart – always good for sales! It’s also really productive, usually the last variety in each planting to succumb to insects and disease. This year, we tried a new yellow zucchini, Sebring, and were very pleased. It’s much more productive than our old standard, Gold Rush. We also grew some patty pans, which aren’t easy to sell here. By the end of the summer, however, we had some regular customers. The only one we couldn’t sell was Flying Saucer, just too weird for our folks. By the way, the “solidness” of the patty pans made them terrific for squash casseroles.

Sweet bell peppers are something we strive to have a nice selection of. Although we don’t sell a lot of them, our regular customers look for them, so we HAVE to have some. Our standard has been King Arthur, and it is still a good variety. However, this year we trialed Goliath from Totally Tomatoes. It was terrific! Large, prolific, disease resistant. It’s more likely to be three lobes and a little less blocky than King Arthur, but it sold really well – probably because of its size. We also grew Goliath jalapeno and were very pleased with its size and heat. Heat seems to be bred out of many commercial types, but this one was hot enough that Alison “overheated” a few dishes before she got used to it.

We usually don’t do a good job with potatoes, and since our space is limited, don’t typically grow them for market. This year, however, eternally optimistic, we planted a much larger area than typical – and grew the best potatoes ever! We sold potatoes at market for about 8 weeks – and customers were very receptive and very sad when they were gone. The best variety we grew was Colorado Rose from Milkranch Specialty Potatoes – beautiful, large rose-red potatoes with very tasty white flesh—Paul’s favorite eating potato ever. We also like Purple Viking, which is purple with pink splotches and also fabulously good tasting. In our market, however, a purple potato – even with white flesh – was a hard sell. If customers bought it once, they came back for it, but that first sale took a lot of work. In a more adventurous market climate, we think it’d be a winner.

This is the second year we have grown a wonderful little cauliflower called Silver Cup from Pinetree Garden Seeds. It’s a 40-day variety that an extension specialist from Mississippi turned us on to. Great in the fall, and since it’s such a short DTM variety, we’re thinking about trying it next spring. Usually our springs are too short for good cauliflower – but eternal optimists, we’re going to try it!

If you have enough high tunnel space, you might want to try Contender beans in the spring. We planted it the 6th of March, about 10 days before we planted tomatoes. It’s a 42 day variety and, as most crops do in high tunnels, produced prolifically. It’s beautiful, has a great taste, and we had it weeks ahead of outdoor varieties. It’s an older variety sometimes sold as Buff Valentine. We grew Indy Gold for a yellow wax bean in outside fields. It was very good – both taste and production. However, many of our customers didn’t even recognize it as a bean! Seems education continues to be an integral part of our marketing.

As with potatoes, melons are something we don’t grow a lot of because of limited space. However, we grew watermelon Sorbet Swirl this year and were very pleased. We displayed them with one cut in half to show off the beautiful color. Some customers passed it up because it wasn’t red, but it mostly got a good reception and we sold out when we had it. We thought it was also very tasty as well as being so beautiful.

Well, we just can’t end an article about varieties without talking about high tunnel varieties. As many of you know, we LOVE lettuce! A beautiful bibb/buttercrunch variety that we like is Red Cross. Large, red, and great in the fall/winter/spring season. Our other must-have in this season is a green Romaine called Kalura. We finally found Kalura this past year at Turtle Tree. And, if you haven’t tried one yet, give salad turnips a try. We really like Hakurei. It’s a very smooth, round white turnip with smooth leaves and a sweet mild taste. We have a young friend who visits our high tunnels in winter just for those special white turnips.

If you’re looking through those new seed catalogs, totally enamored of some new variety, we hope we’ve helped give you a little direction. Remember, we are south-central Kentucky, zone B and take our advice “with a little salt”! Have fun browsing and planning!