How to find the best vegetables to grow in your garden
My favorite picks for tomatoes, cucumber, watermelon and winter squash
The new gardening season for me always begins in the dead of winter, when the seed catalogs start to arrive in the mail. It may be cold and gloomy outside, but in front of me is an array of brightly colored flowers, fruits, and vegetables, and - instantly - the reminder that warm days and sunshine are just around the corner.
The catalogs always have so many options! We are all - of course - limited by the zone we grow in, but within each of those bands, there are so many varieties to choose from for every type of vegetable and herb.
Just look at the humble tomato: you can choose between slicers, sauce, or cherry. Determinate, or indeterminate. Hybrid, or heirloom. There are deep red ones that are lightly acidic, black ones that have a mottled red/purple/black skin, yellow ones that make you wonder if they’ve ripened yet, and truly ugly heirloom varieties whose description in the catalog promises delicious, old-world “true tomato” flavor.
It’s hard to pick from such an endless buffet, but alas, we only have so much space to grow in. So how do you choose? In my opinion, there are only two factors that you should consider when you decide what to grow:
What do you love to eat?
What grows well in your garden?
After all, who wouldn’t want a prolific harvest of fresh, homegrown potatoes if you love potatoes? And if something struggles in your garden, there’s no reason to keep fighting against nature. Nature will always win and you will have absolutely no fun during the battle. Buy those things at your local farmer’s market instead.
Finding your varieties is a matter of trial and error over the course of several seasons. I think this is one of the joys and privileges of living somewhere for a period of time because the knowledge of your specific place (or as the French would call it, the terroir) is only earned after several years of patient observation and trials. Everything has an impact: the sun, the soil, the winds, the pests, temperatures, rain, and all of it can be slightly different in your garden than it is in your neighbor’s just a few streets down.
If you choose things that look interesting and plant them, you will need a whole growing season to see how they perform, and to taste-test the harvest, and there’s no guarantee that any of them will have been the right choices.
We’ve had three summers in this garden now and it’s been just enough time to start to find a few varieties that not only perform amazingly well here but are also our favorites when it comes to flavor and yield.
Here are my current favorites:
Mexico Midget Tomato
I grew these tiny cherry tomatoes for the first time this year and everything has been exceptional about them: they produce perfect tiny fruits that are the epitome of fresh tomato flavor and sweetness, and they have been disease-free and highly productive throughout the entire season. I can’t imagine planting any other variety.Waltham Butternut Squash
This is our second year growing this variety and I can say with confidence now that these will be a staple in our garden. Waltham makes well-behaved vines and we plant several along a trellis to grow vertically. The squash stores very well over the winter and makes delicious roasted butternut squash soup. What more could you want?Summerdance Hybrid Cucumber
Cucumbers are notoriously difficult to grow in the hot, humid Tennessee summers. Mostly, they start out strong and then succumb to heat stress and wind up getting afflicted with some kind of mildew sometime in July. Poof, end of cumberber harvest. But Summerdance has been bred for both heat and mildew resistance and it shows. These beautiful, long Japanese cucumbers were delicious, thin-skinned with tiny seeds, and produced well into August with no issues at all. I suspect I could probably make a second planting of these that would take me well into fall.This is a smaller watermelon variety (6-12lbs each) whose description reads like it’s for northern zones because it’s a short-season variety, quick to harvest. But it also supposedly does well in hot, humid locations. This was the first year I planted it and it has produced superbly well, with multiple two-person-sized watermelons per vine. Each melon was delicious and had that rich watermelon flavor. As an added bonus, the rinds are fairly thick on these, which I think kept the mice from getting too curious and breaking into the fruit — a problem for us on our honeydew and cantaloupes for the last two seasons.
Things that I haven’t figured out yet:
Slicing tomatoes. I’ve tried different varieties every year and typically only get a handful of tomatoes. My only requirement is that I have a consistent supply of flavorful tomatoes for BLTs, but none have really had exceptional health or yield.
Peppers. These all do fine - late summer in Tennesee is perfect pepper weather - but I always seem to plant too many hot peppers and not enough snacking peppers. There are certainly no particular varieties that are on my must-plant list yet. Next year I’ll be trialing one or two plants of a lot of different varieties to see if I can find favorites.
Tomatillos. In our last garden, I grew purple tomatillos that produced basketfuls of fruits for salsa verde throughout the entire late summer. Here, neither the purple ones I’ve grown before, nor the other varieties I have tried, have done well. They typically start fading sometime in mid-summer and wind up as desiccated husks of plants by August.
Onions, garlic, and lettuce are still on my list to trial as well, but I’m in no rush. If I can find one or two new favorites each year, it’s a win. After all, I think that this trial-and-error process is part of what makes gardening so interesting and rewarding.
Other random gardening things:
I’m gearing up for our local plant swap in October by digging up extra things in my garden and getting them acclimated in pots in a shady corner. This twice-a-year event is one of my favorites and is a great way to share plants and get new ones for free. If your area has one, it’s probably worth checking out. If it doesn’t, maybe you are the person to start one.
This is officially my favorite garden nozzle. Well-built and gives a very satisfying click as you move through the settings. No drips at all.
If you are in Zone 6-7-8ish it’s a great time to plant some fall vegetables. A lot of nurseries sell starts, but there’s still time to direct sow as well.
“Field Notes from Woodside Gardens” is a collection of stories about creating a garden. Most Fridays, I share what’s going on in our garden, along with tips and ideas that you can use in yours, wherever you are. Please consider becoming a free subscriber if you haven’t already.
I was fascintated a few years back when I learned about zones!