Selecting Seeds

As the snow piles up outside and the seed catalogs pile up inside, I enjoy sitting down with a cup of tea and deciding what to order. There’s something about the contrast between the winter weather and those beautiful pictures of sun-ripened tomatoes that makes my mouth water.

 

Roma paste tomatoes work very well for me. They bear abundant, good-tasting fruit that stands up to the challenges of being tossed into a lunch bag, a backpack, or even a shirt pocket. Sliced in a sandwich, they don’t make the bread soggy. Almost every time I want to start a crock pot of sauce or of stewed tomatoes I can count on finding plenty of fruit from my three plants.

 

Romas have good disease resistance, but I still take steps to reduce exposure to early blight, late blight and fusarium wilt. Before I set the plants in the garden, I run a soaker hose along the row and mulch the ground to prevent spores from splashing up onto the plants during rainstorms. Then I keep them staked off the ground and promptly remove any discolored lower leaves.

 

Much as I appreciate Romas, I’m not passionate about growing them. It’s hard to love a workhorse. Brandywine generates passion with its truly superb flavor, but the year I tried Barandywines. I let them rot on the vine. I kept waiting for the fruit to ripen, not realizing the flesh inside would be sweet and dark red long before the outside looked ready.

 

A quick glance at a map of the U.S. shows New Hampshire perched in the northeast corner. Our growing season is short, so I always plant an early variety like Early Girl,. even though plant breeders sacrificed some taste to get a shorter time to harvest.

 

What else? Nantes carrots do well in my sandy soil, even though I have trouble making myself thin them according to the directions on the package. My husband’s family always waited until the carrots had formed ¾-inch roots before thinning, so they could enjoy a meal of the fresh baby carrots. They had clay soil which held the remaining carrots firmly in place. Since I have loose soil, thinning disturbs the hair-like feeder roots of the remaining carrots. To avoid this problem I need to thin mine much earlier. On the other hand the loose soil lets my carrots grow longer and straighter than theirs.

 

Since my soil is sandy, potassium, the nutrient that contributes to overall plant health and disease resistance, leaches out quickly, is a common problem in New Hampshire . I add compost to the garden every year to help retain water, but compost alone doesn’t contain enough potassium to solve my problem. I get my soil tested every two years and follow the Cooperative Extension recommendations for adding additional potassium. This information appears right on the lab report, and I can choose an organic source like sul-po-mag, green sand or potassium sulfate.

 

So far I’ve stuck with some well-known old favorites, but cucumbers and green beans are another story. Forget how they stand up to freezing or canning; I choose them for fun! Round lemon cucumbers, purple bush beans and oriental pole beans with pods a yard long have all appeared in my garden. I lash together three saplings to support pole beans, but the Japanese beetles find (and perhaps prefer) the climbing bean varieties long before they notice the bush beans. On the other hand, the yellow larvae of the bean beetle prefer the lower and thicker row of bush beans. Speaking of bush plants, I’ve tried new “bush” varieties of vine crops like cucumbers, squash and pumpkins. They save space and bear abundantly.

 

Once I have made my list, how do I whittle it down to a manageable size? I ask other gardeners and check organizations like NOFA (Northeastern Organic Farmers Association) and UNH Cooperative Extension for lists of recommended varieties. Sometimes I can find a useful discussion group on the Web, but I always check for the geographic area of the person raving about one variety or another.

 

Cornell University sponsors a Citizen Science program in which they invite gardeners to use a five-star system to rate vegetable varieties they have grown. Their Plant Science department maintains the site. Besides summarizing those varieties with the highest ratings, the Cornell site shows how many gardeners have participated in each evaluation. This feature helps me to decide whether enough gardeners have rated a variety for me to have confidence in the result. Next fall, I definitely plan to share my conclusions with other gardeners by entering my evaluations into their database.

 

Call the UNH Cooperative Extension's Family, Home & Garden Education Center 's Info-Line toll-free at 1-877-3984769 for "Practical Solutions to Everyday Questions." Trained volunteers are available to answer your questions Monday through Friday from 9 am to 2 pm .

 

By Joan Pushee, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener Coordinator, Hillsborough County