I really look forward to going around nurseries and garden centres at this time of the year, as there’s always something new to see in the plant world. There are some weird and wonderful new vegetable varieties worth tracking down this year. If you fancy trying something out of the ordinary to impress your neighbours at the allotment and the guests at your dinner table, here are a few to tempt you, available at most good garden centres:
Salad leaves ‘Niche Oriental Mixed’: If you want to make an exotic salad for your summer garden parties, try this new salad leaves pack. It includes a variety of leaf mustards such as komatsuna, mizuna and sky rocket (golden-streaked and red).
You can sow the seed in succession so you can pick the leaves and rustle up salads whenever you want.
Runner Bean ‘Celebration’: Runner beans are great for vitamin C and popular with most taste buds, but they’re time consuming to prepare for cooking. This new variety is stringless so you don’t need to go through the hassle of stringing the beans. What’s more, it gives you beautiful salmon-pink flowers, and is an early cropping variety.
Winter squash ‘Celebration’: The sweetness of squashes makes them one of the great winter comfort foods when used is soups, and this variety has up to 50 per cent higher sugar content than other acorn squashes, so you can even eat it raw!
Don’t worry – you won’t have to eat squash endlessly after you’ve harvested it, as the fruits will store for up to six months. This variety produces three different colours of fruit for extra interest in your garden or allotment.
Speedy Seed – Baby Veg: If you like growing your own vegetables but want quick results; Suttons range of speedy seeds will enable you to harvest baby vegetables, including carrots, spinach and turnips, in just six to 12 weeks. They’re all versatile and easy to cook.
Cauliflower ‘Purple Graffiti’: Jazz up cauliflower cheese with this colourful cauliflower. The purple colour is due to anthocyanins, a source of antioxidants, and if you don’t want the colour to drain, then add a squeeze of lemon juice when you’re cooking it.
Cabbage ‘Kilaxy’: Many of you have probably been cursed with clubroot disease and had your crops of cabbage decimated, leaving the soil unusable for brassicas for years.
Traditional remedies rely on crop rotation and chemical treatments which are not always easily available, but this new Dutch white-type of cabbage is highly resistant to clubroot infection.
Sweetcorn ‘Earlybird’: This new variety has good tolerance to cold soil conditions in early growth. So if you live in a colder area of the country, growing ‘Earlybird’ will greatly improve your chances of melting a knob of butter on your own home grown corn on the cob! Large, succulent cobs are produced in good quantities.
Spade to spoon, all just outside your back door.
Get some great vegetable varieties here »»
