What to grow?(part 2 of 2)

One question I see asked by new gardeners a lot on social media is “What vegetables should I grow?”

My answer is……”it depends”.

It depends on why you want to grow vegetables.  Do you want to save money, reduce your carbon footprint, for the flavour, or grow for showing?  This article explores growing for flavour and growing for showing.

Growing for Flavour.  If you are growing to get better flavoured food, you’re on safe ground.  Supermarket veg is actually quite high quality, but the varieties chosen for sale are not solely selected for flavour; aesthetic appeal, yield, shelf life etc are significant factors.  So often, but not always, flavour is compromised. Another benefit of homegrown vegetables is freshness; I very rarely buy strawberries, partly because the June overdose of homegrown is enough for the year, but also because they are often close to going off when purchased.  Homegrown herbs are great, herbs such as sage, rosemary, thyme, bay are usually available to pick fresh all year.  Most vegetables are hugely better when used fresh from picking.  I think the only crops that are not are maincrop potatoes, onions and garlic.  Even if you freeze your vegetables, homegrown frozen peas are still much better than frozen supermarket peas.

Growing your own allows you to grow varieties not available in the shops and focus on flavour.  It may take a bit of trial error though, and be wary of recommendations from other gardeners, everyone’s palate is different.  Take strawberries for example.  After a few trials I have settled for “Garriguette”, an old French variety, and “Snow White”, a new white strawberry.  Both are not heavy croppers, and do not have a long shelf life, so you won’t see them in the shops, but to me they are the best tasting.  Not everyone will agree and white strawberry jam is to be avoided (it ends up a dirty brown colour!).

Be aware that seed sellers tend to exaggerate – just about every strawberry is the tastiest and sweetest! One thing you can probably be sure of is if they only state that if is a heavy cropper, or a good show variety without any mention of flavour, you can reliably assume it won’t taste that good. 

Some vegetables are just as good from the supermarket when compared to homegrown.  For example, I cannot see too much benefit from home grown potatoes.  However, the gardener can grow varieties not seen in the shops.  I think the potato variety “Cara” is the best for roast potatoes, but you are unlikely to see this variety in the supermarket.  I think the reason for this is that slugs seem to find “Cara” delicious and yields are very heavily reduced due to this.  I grow Cara only in potato bags or pots using new compost to avoid the slug problem.

Growing for Showing.  If growing for the village show, you might be able to simply exhibit the varieties you would normally grow.  A good example is that for parsnips the variety Gladiator will win local shows, and is probably one of the best for flavour; it is more about how you grow the parsnip than the variety.    For the national shows, you will need to research the variety to grow, and probably specialise.  For example, the growing guide produced by the National Vegetable Society for potatoes, describes the preparation of 284 pots for growing potatoes, using 128 bags of peat!

A good way to research what varieties to grow is to attend shows.  Some of the top shows will often stipulate that the variety is marked on the exhibit (hint, see my website for photos of the Malvern National Vegetable Society show).  Failing this, simply ask the grower, most are happy to share.  I’ve also found several of the Facebook groups for showing vegetables very  helpful, and some growers are happy to share or sell specialist seeds (for example, the winner of the Malvern National Vegetable Society Runner Bean category offers her winning seeds for sale).

Specialist seed is needed to grow giants (usually)

Quite often the best looking vegetables are not the most tastiest, so growing for showing will be a compromise between show vegetables and flavour, but not always.  A good example of this are tomatoes.  For standard tomatoes, the show grower tends to go for “Maisey”, which I find to be my least favourite tomato taste wise. However, for plum tomatoes, “Super Mama” is a good show variety which also has a great flavour.  The same goes for cherry tomatoes,”Minoprio F1” (round cherry) and “Apero” (cherry plum) are great show varieties, and both taste great.

Miniprio F1 tomatoes – good for shows and eating

Another example is carrots.  For long carrots you will need to grow a long carrot variety from one of the specialist seed suppliers.  This will produce massive long carrots (about 1m long), but will not have great flavour.  However, for the stump rooted carrot, the choice is usually “Sweet Candle” which is I think one of the best tasting carrots available.

Sweet Candle – perfect show carrots (not mine) and good to eat

Be aware that simply growing the correct seed does not guarantee success.  Carrots planted in stoney clay soil will be mis-formed, forked and generally not great. To win shows you will need to plant in finely sieved soil and pamper them.

For some vegetable categories, timing is one of the most important factors.  For example, radishes and beetroots, you will need to time your crop to be at its best on the day of the show, sew too early and they will be ugly giants, sew too late and they will not be visible!

I use the following seed suppliers:

• Medwyn’s of Anglesea (www.medwynsofanglesey.co.uk). A show grower with a commercial website, seeds are of the highest quality available.

• Select Seeds (www.selectseeds.co.uk).  For anything not available at Medwyn’s!

• Giant Vegetable Seeds (www.giantveg.co.uk). A website run by one of the best giant vegetable growers.