What?!?!?! No corn?

Aw gee. I knew I'd forget something.

I'm growing the following sweet corn varieties.

SWEET CORN:
Early Sunglow
Sugar Pearl
Silver Queen
Country Gentleman

What a list Dawn! I wish I had the time and space to plant such a garden!

Mine fails in comparison but I will post anyway :)

Tomatoes:
Black Cherry
Green Zebra
Speckled Roman
Brandy Wine Pink
Pineapple
SuperSweet 100
Hillbilly/Flame
German Lunchbox

Peppers:
Giant Marconi
Anaheim
Habanero
Mucho Nacho
Poblano
Super Chili
Tabasco
Quadtro D'Asti Giallo
Italian Pepperoncini
Red Mushroom

Cucumber:
Sikkim
White Armenian

Melon:
Kolb's Gem Watermelon
Rich Sweetness 132
Ananas D'Amerique A Chair Verta
Hales Best

Beans/Greens:
Green Butterbean Soybean
Alfalfa Sprouts

Okra:
Clemson Spineless
Burgundy

Corn:
On Deck Hybrid (Sweet)

Tomatillo:
Verde

Berries:
Bountiful Blue Blueberry
Yellow Wonder Wild Strawberry

Other:
Gooseneck Gourd
Zucchini

Thanks, Ms Dawn. You are my Corn Guru this year.

Hey Dawn

I have a question and its more because Im curious than anything.

How come you plant so many different types of each?
Does it increase your odds of having at least some that do well each year.
Is it simply just to have variety or try something new.

Reason I ask is Ill be growing in a much bigger garden than last year and I was thinking about what to grow. I have always done a few different varieties of tomato each year because of their uniqueness but I often stare at the seed racks and see so many different types of cucumbers, corn, beans, etc and think surely they are all the same. DTM's im sure play a big role and I do take that into account but usually I have no idea which ones to get or try.

Thanks
Mike

Mike,

There are many reasons.

The main reason is that different varieties are not just different named versions of the same thing---they have different flavors and other different qualities. I love green beans, but I don't want to eat the same green bean all summer long. I want different flavors and textures.

Some varieties do not work well at all for freezing or canning, but others do. So I can or freeze the varieties that can and freeze well, but eat fresh the varieties that don't preserve well.

Some of it is a hedge against the vagaries of weather. Different varieties perform differently in various types of weather. With a lot of different varieties, you increase the odds that you'll get great production from at least some of what you plant. I rarely have a year that is a true dud with very poor production. I believe that is partly because I hedge my bets by planting so many different varieties.

Different colors of produce are, to me, the spice of life. Why eat only red-fleshed watermelons when they also are available with white, pale yellow, bright yellow, pink, orange and even swirled/mixed colors? If we're having a bowl of melon balls to eat as a light dessert after dinner, why can't it include red, yellow and orange melon balls? Maybe with a cantaloupe or honeydew thrown in?

It isn't just about looks of having a wide variety of harvest times, flavors and texture either. As a cancer survivor of many years, the nutritional content of what I grow is very important to me. Remember that different colors of skin, flesh, leaves, etc., come from different phytonutrients, phenols and other compounds and for the best, most well-balanced diet, nutrient-wise, we should try to eat a wide variety of foods in many different natural colors. That is one reason breeders are working to develop blue tomatoes---to help us get more anthocyanins in our diets, for example. Scientists have found that different antioxidant compounds are associated with the phenols and other compounds that produce different colors in produce. So, if you eat a wide range of different colors of produce, you're getting a wider range of natural antioxidants in your diet.

I also just really enjoy having a colorful garden. For some reason I cannot explain, it gives me great joy to bring more colors of produce into the house. I am perfectly content to carry a bucket of green podded snap beans to the house. However, when I carry a bucket of mixed green, yellow, purple, pink, red and bi-color beans to the house, I am almost giddy. I feel the same way when I have a bowl of tomatoes on the counter. Red ones are fine. However, a bowl of black, purple, pink, yellow, red, orange and bicolored tomatoes is not just a bowl of tomatoes---it is a celebration of the biodiversity that is found in tomatoes. Maybe for me, that's really what it all comes down to---celebrating the biodiversity that exists in Mother Nature.

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, I knew (or thought I knew) what vegetables looked like---tomatoes were red, eggplant was purple, corn was yellow or (if you grew your own, white), carrots and pumpkins were orange and celery was green. Why were they that way? It wasn't because only those colors of those vegetables existed in nature. It was because long ago the commercial growers, agricultural breeders. marketing folks and others involved in the production of and sale of produce decided that was how it was. After I began growing heirlooms and discovered that vegetables come in many colors never seen in the grocery store, I wanted to grow them all. I think that selectively choosing only certain colors of produce probably doesn't do us any good nutritionally.

When I select different varieties, I always have my eye on their DTMs. For example, I don't want to choose bean varieties that all produce is 60 days. I want some that produce in 50, 55, 60, 65, 70 days, etc. Too many green beans at one time can be a problem. Spreading out the harvest over a longer period of time works better for me.

As a bonus, when you have kids who might not be big fans of veggies, they can be tempted into trying yellow or red carrots, yellow or orange cherry tomatoes, purple broccoli, pink green beans, etc. It doesn't matter if the kids are your own children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews, the children of friends or whatever....if you can get them to try new veggies or fruit they normally shun because they "don't like vegetables" then you've just done them a favor.

With regards to buying seeds of different varieties, I try to carefully research varieties before I buy them. I want to know that people who have tried them before me found them worth growing for some reason--flavor, disease tolerance, heavy production, drought tolerance, etc. I look for varieties known to produce well in hot summer climates and known to tolerate pretty wide swings in temperatures and moisture levels. It is very hard to know what ones to buy. When I first started gardening here, I mostly grew the same varieties I'd grown in Texas 80 miles south of where I now live. That worked out pretty well, so Willhite Seed Company has been my go-to seed supplier because it only carries seeds that do well regionally. With a lot of seed suppliers, you have to know if they are a nationally-oriented retailer or regionally-oriented. With some of the regionally-oriented suppliers, I have found that if there region is very different from ours, their varieties might not do as well here. The more I got into growing heirloom and open-pollinated varieties, the more I have gravitated towards a handful of suppliers whose varieties have repeatedly grown well here: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, Bountiful Gardens, Victory Seeds and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. With Baker Creek, I have to be careful because some of their tomato varieties haven't done well for me. It is the same with Tomatofest. I avoid the big retailers who have seed racks in all the stores. Why? Because their seeds are chosen because they will grown well in the majority of the USA. Well, Oklahoma's weather is not necessarily like the weather in the majority of the country, so hybrids developed to do well in the USA at large may not do well here in our hot, dry, miserable little niche.

I hope this answers your question, and we can discuss it further if you have more questions or comments.

One last comment, and I sure this will not surprise you....when we collect eggs from our free-range chickens, we don't just bring white eggs into the house. Over the course of the year, we will bring in eggs that are white, light brown, dark brown, brown with darker brown speckles, olive green and pale blue. Biodiversity exists in the world of chickens almost as much as it exists in the garden. You'll never find a carton filled with only white eggs in my fridge! : )

Dawn

Dawn

thank you so much for the info. All you said make perfect sense. I never once thought about the seed racks in big box stores having only stuff that does well all over. They want to ship one rack to all the stores to keep it simple.

Wow I need to check out some of the ones you posted.

Thanks again
Mike

Mike,

You're welcome.

I used to love the stuff on the seed racks. It grew fine most of the time. Then I discovered that if I went with regional seed companies that choose seeds for a specific regions, I have even better success. That was when I was growing mostly hybrids.

With open-pollinated vartieties, any variety traditionally grown in the western or southern USA has performed pretty well for me. O-P varieties from eastern and northeastern areas have not necessarily done as well here. So, that is how I branched out from Willhite to Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (actually a retail company, not a true seed exchange per se) and others.

Sometimes it is hard to admit that some favorite things we want to grow here just do not like our climate and will not grow or produce here. For example, I'd love to be able to grow raspberries, but in my clay and in our relentlessly hot climate, I'd never succeed with them here in southern OK. The same is true of blueberries, only even more so....our soil pH (before the soil is amended and the pH adjusted) tests at 8.2 to 8.3. I could fix the soil enough to make blueberries happy, but my water consistently tests at the same pH, and I don't want to have to correct the water pH every time I water blueberries, so no home-grown blueberries for us. I try to grow rhubarb for Tim every year, but it won't grow for me here like it grew for his family in Pennsylvania. My favorite tomato is Brandywine, originally believed to be from the Brandywine river vally area of Pennsylvania. Needless to say, it produces huge crops there and not such huge crops (if any crop at all) here most years. I can get a good Brandywine crop about 2 years out of 10, so I don't bother planting it unless I am expecting an incredibly cool and rainy year. I think a part of becoming an accomplished gardener involves learning what varieties you can count on and what ones are better left to people in the right region for those vegetables or fruits, or at least those varieties of them.

Sometimes a gardener's brain ignores logic, which certainly isn't a crime. I love Scarlet runner beans. I love growing them. The plants are lush and gorgeous. I love the beautiful red flowers, and the hummingbirds love them more than I do. They rarely produce many if any beans here because our climate is too hot for them. I grow them anyway. Sometimes, the heart wants what it wants....even if what it wants is not necessarily an intelligent choice. This year my heart wants to grow runner beans (while my brain screams "No! Don't do it!". In order to feed my heart's desire to grow scarlet runner bean this year, I am going to plant several varieties, including Tenderstar, a new bean that is a cross between a runner bean and a French bean. Maybe it will work out and I'll have a new favorite on my "must grow" list. Or, maybe it will end in disappointment. I'll never know until I try.

So there's times I think, you just have to grow what you want to grow even if it requires extra effort and there is a high risk of disappointment. You know....(grinning as I type this) kind of like growing citrus fruits in NE OK.

That reminds me of one more thing, my lemon tree is budding and about to bloom. It seems to early for that. I don't think it bloomed last year until late February.

Dawn

How cool dawn. I didn't know you had citrus. Mine are blooming a bit early also but I Dont mind it LoL. It looks like I should get a good crop of meyer lemons and key limes. Thanks for all your information you share here.

Mike

Mike,

You're welcome.

I don't mention my citrus plants much. I guess I am a neglectful citrus mom. I just try to keep them watered year-round and warm in the winter and they pretty much do the rest without me. My favorite thing about them is their fragrance. Nothing screams "spring is coming" like the delicious aroma of citrus blossoms.

I had a good crop of lemons in 2012, but only two oranges. The grasshoppers attacked the plants brutally all summer long and just kept devouring their leaves, so I need to do a better job of keeping the hoppers away from the citrus this year.

Dawn

If you have citrus trees outside in summer, Dawn, you may also be plagued by the infamous Orange Dog.......the Giant Swallowtail. It's larval host is Citrus, and I know Florida citrus growers fight them constantly. We also get them, but they are generally consuming Wafer Ash, Prickly Ash, and cultivated Rue. The larvae look like bird droppings.

Wow - you grow just about everything, don't you?

Susan

Mike, Oops, I mis-spoke. It is not the lemon tree that is budding and about to bloom, it is the mandarin orange. I noticed the plant label last night when I was carrying in the plants from the unheated sunroom to the breakfast room. The lemon is further behind the orange in terms of buds and blooms.

Susan, I do see an Orange Dog a few times a summer, but so far I've only seen the butterflies and not the cats.

I wouldn't say I grow just about everything....but I can be sort of adventurous. I plant whatever I want to plant, which explains why there is a Chinaberry in the back yard (the wild things love its purple flowers) and a mimosa in the front yard for the hummers and other flying critters. I know that both of them are not high-quality top-of-the-line long-lived trees in our climate, but we always had them when I was a kid and I loved them so I planted them here. Despite the reputation they both have for being invasive, neither one of them has given me one self-sown seedling yet. I didn't plant either of them in our yard in Fort Worth because it was a standard-sized city lot that already was heavily treed, but out here in the boondocks, I have lots of room for experimentation.

I've only got the two citrus trees. I might add a lime and something else, maybe a kumquat, this spring.

Dawn

Here's mine. I'll include my tomato list because it's changed.

BEAN
Rattlesnake (Pole)
Contender (Bush)
Festina (Bush)

CANTALOUPE
Scrumptious
Sugar Cube

CARROTS
Little Finger
Tendersweet

SWEET CORN
Bodacious

EGGPLANT
Pingtung Long
??

OKRA
Lee

PEPPER
Mucho Nacho
Gigantia
Yummy Orange
Cherry Stuffer
Habanero

SOUTHERN PEA
Pinkeye Purplehull

SUMMER SQUASH
Horn of Plenty
Eight Ball

WINTER SQUASH
Spaghetti

TOMATO
Sungold
Heidi
San Marzano Redorta
Principe Borghese
Big Boy
Gary'O Sena

I'm sure it will change before it's done.

Leslie

Leslie,

My list changes almost daily while it is still on paper. After I type it here, I try not to change it too much...but it does still change some.

I hate it when seed catalogs arrive with tempting varieties after I've already posted my list. On the other hand, sometimes it makes me put an interesting variety on the list for fall or for next year instead of adding it to this year's list.

Adding varieties wouldn't be hard if I didn't feel like I have to drop something else to make room for the new variety.

Dawn