Vegetable-Picking Starts in Catalogs and Stores

Hints of summer are here, perhaps not outside, but in seed catalogs in mailboxes and on seed racks in stores. Look at how many varieties of each vegetable are offered! One catalog has 28 varieties of tomato and 17 varieties of peas.

Many vegetable gardeners choose varieties for their flavor. Often it’s worth sacrificing productivity, even some susceptibility to pests, if a certain variety is particularly delectable.

Let’s start with the most widely grown backyard vegetable, the tomato. A list of the best-tasting varieties would have to include Belgian Giant, Brandywine, Sungold and, for canning, San Marzano.

Peas, primarily the new snap-type peas, get a lot of publicity these days. With succulent, edible pods, snap peas yield more than shelling peas and are easier to eat. But also consider getting seed for shelling peas, especially delectable varieties such as Lincoln and Green Arrow. Shelling takes time but is worth it for the special flavor.

With a long enough growing season to ripen a good crop of lima beans, the one to grow is ‘King of the Garden,’ an old pole-type variety. For something different, grow vegetable soybeans, which you pop out of their green shells into your mouth after steaming them for five minutes. The flavor is deliciously nutty, something like a combination of a lima bean and pea.

Favorite snap-bean varieties among gardeners are Scarlet Runner, Kentucky Wonder and Blue Lake. Scarlet Runner would never sell in the markets, for the beans are thick, hairy and coarse. Close your eyes and eat them. Kentucky Wonder has a good, old-fashioned green-bean taste. Blue Lake beans are the most refined of the lot--velvety smooth in texture and flavor.

Sweetness is the traditional goal sought in sweet corn. The new “supersweet” hybrids can have four times the sugar of regular sweet corn. Some gardeners do not like their sweet corn too sweet and do not want ears to ripen all at once, which even regular hybrid varieties do. Golden Bantam is a good-tasting, non-supersweet, non-hybrid variety that has been around since the early 20th century.

Choosing a good variety is not the only thing that makes tasty vegetables. Just about all lettuce varieties taste good, but you have to grow them right to bring out their best flavor, which means giving them a fertile, moist soil and timing them to mature during the cooler days of spring and fall.