Vegetable Varieties To Try For The Adventurous Cook

Up your homestead garden game and your fresh kitchen ingredients with these great varieties of veggies to grow in your garden.

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New Veg For The Kitchen

My husband is much more of a cook than I am but we both agree on one thing, that our garden-grown veggies are sooooooo much better than anything from the grocery store, even the fancy organic stuff. One of the great things about growing a garden is the variety you can grow and try in the kitchen. Since I’ve been cooking my own vegetarian meals for one I’ve had a chance to try new things.

One of the neat things you can do if you are a gardener is trying new varieties. New varieties to grow add diversity to the garden but it can also be fun to try new varieties for the kitchen too. This is how we came to discover that Cherokee Purple, Amish Paste, Black Krim, and Black Icicle tomatoes make a wonderfully deep, tomato pasta sauce together and are now a mainstay of our garden planning.

We did a blind taste test as a family and chose our favorite varieties to grow based on taste. We never would have known how good these were if I hadn’t been a little adventurous in planting different varieties. Try a couple of new varieties along with your favorites to see if there are others you like better.

Coeur di Bleu, Mortgage lifter, Railroad, Shirley, True Black Brandywine, Purple Dog Creek, Amish Orange Sherbet, Italian Paste WWII, Amazon Chocolate, Kellogg Breakfast, Neptune, and Paw Paw are just some of the new heirlooms I’ll be trying this year. They might all grow or none at all but I can’t wait to try them out!

Lettuce

Lettuces are quite easy to grow a number of different varieties in a small space. Hubby prefers butterhead type lettuces whereas I like the crunchiness of a romaine type. It is quite surprising how different lettuces can taste. I love growing so many different types of greens and lettuces for salads.

One of our favorite late spring salads is a mix of soft and crunchy leaves, mountain spinach, baby spinach, and beet leaves. But it’s hard to beat baby kale and spinach salad for a nutrient-packed spring salad. You can buy salad blends which makes it easy to grow a salad rather any having to fret over what varieties to grow. We grow some mixed saved seeds of lettuce from the garden, DMR blend salad, a Seed Savers lettuce mix, Ironman kale salad mix as well as Rouge d’Hiver, Winter Density, Devil’s Ear, Butter King, and Black Seeded Simpson lettuces. This year I have some Restoration Romaine and the interestingly ruffled Hyper Red Rumple Waved to throw in the mix too.

Lettuce is one of those plants where you can try a bunch of different ones in one growing season. If you sow one variety then 2 weeks later sow a different variety, then 2 weeks later another you can make the use of successional sowing and try something different.

For example, let’s say you love Flashy Trouts Back Romaine lettuce, you sow that at the beginning of the growing season in early spring that would be 30 April for me. 2 weeks later so 14 May you sow Gulley’s Favorite lettuce to try, 2 weeks after that so 28 May, you sow another variety let’s say Red Salad bowl, 2 weeks later 11 June if my math is right, and you decide to sow some more Flashy Trouts Back Romaine then 2 weeks later 25 June you sow Helvius Romaine lettuce. Now you have not only extended your lettuce growing to have more harvests because those plants you started in April should be starting to be ready for harvesting from around 29 June based on 60 days to maturity. You also have been able to grow more varieties. Now you can mix it up and sow more of your Flashy Trout Romaine favorite with a few seeds of the new variety or just sow the new varieties. Whatever works for you and your garden. Remember there’s no one who gardens like you and there are as many ways to garden as there are people on planet Earth so you do you my friend and what works for your garden.

This successional sowing trick can be used to squeeze in more varieties to try for other plants too. Try it for carrots, spring onions or scallions, radishes, spinach, kale, chard, peas, mizuna, tatsoi, bok choi, mustard, cilantro, beets, turnips, and broccoli raab. All of which are great early spring veggies and herbs.

Using Your Home-Grown Vegetables

Having a garden often means we try to do more in the kitchen with what is ready in the garden. Try to challenge yourself to make one meal a week totally from the garden with whatever is ready to harvest. The weekly trip to the allotment plot was one of my favorite things on the weekend. Taking some basic ingredients like an egg or a little olive oil, a cup of oats for oatmeal, and my flask of tea. Along with a little camp stove and a mess tin to cook with. I headed off to the allotment with the doggies and would try to make breakfast from the plot using whatever was ready to harvest. It might have been oatmeal with rhubarb, crepes, and blackcurrant compote or a spring onion omelet. I never got carrots though because my beloved border collie Sparky is the first to sniff those that are ready and tasty and pull those up and help himself! At 17 yrs old he still does it!

Winter Squash

We grow a number of different winter squash varieties: Table Queen which is an acorn type squash, Burgess Buttercup which is a softer more fibrous type of flesh. Ute has a similar texture to the buttercup, Winter Luxury Pie, and Marina de Chioggia. We also grow Waltham butternut. I found that I hated the taste and texture of the acorn squash and even the Winter Luxury Pie pumpkin. They were watery to me and lacked any sweetness or flavor. My husband on the other hand loved them! I have even tried Delicata winter squash which is the same squash family as the Winter Luxury and it is meant to be very sweet. These varieties and Vegetable Spaghetti and the Table Queen acorn squash, are part of the Cucurbita pepo family which also has large Halloween pumpkins like Howden and Connecticut Field and summer squashes, zucchini, and marrows. I’ve tried to like these winter squashes, I really have! I’ve tried them in pies, soups, stews, curries, stuffed and roasted. But the pepo family of Cucurbita is definitely relegated to summer squashes, Halloween pumpkins, and the vegetable spaghetti for me and my palette.

Now the buttercup type of squash is part of the Cucurbita maxima family. They also have some Halloween and fancy type varieties in there like the Cinderella pumpkins. The flesh of these types can be a bit drier, they puree down well and don’t hold up as firmly as a butternut type of squash does. The flesh of these varieties of often high in carotenes making it orange or peach in color. I find these varieties more flavorful and versatile in the kitchen from making Sardinian thippulas to roasting with garlic, rosemary, chili flakes, and olive oil. My favorite is the Marina di Chioggia the Italian sea pumpkin. Green and warty on the outside but delicious on the inside. I’m also very fond of the Candy Roaster North Georgia, Hubbard, and Bannana-type squashes for flavor and versatility.

Butternut-type squashes belong to the Cucurbita moschata family and are the most long-lasting in storage of all the squashes. Waltham butternut was always hit or miss to grow in the garden in Utah. I had more success with Orange Butternut and Pennsylvania Dutch Crookneck and quite surprisingly the large Italian heirloom Lunga di Napoli. These squashes have deep orange flesh thanks to lots of phytonutrients like carotenes in their flesh. They work in a variety of dishes although butternut squash and sweet potato soup with chili is my winter go-to. Cucurbita moschata varieties need a longer growing season to grow and it isn’t uncommon in short-season gardens to grow these under hoop houses or in greenhouses.

Tips for Finding Tasty Varieties

If you are new to gardening or shopping for seeds and you are wanting varieties that are great tasting then look for Ark of Taste Slow Foods USA varieties. If you are looking for varieties online try searching for Ark of Taste on the seed supplier’s website in the search bar and see if they have any varieties there. Brandywine tomato, Candy Roster Melon Squash, Cherokee Purple tomato, Deer Tongue lettuce, Gilfeather Turnip rutabaga, Jimmy Nardello’s Italian sweet pepper, Seven Top turnips, Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato Squash, Oland Swedish Brown bean are some varieties that you might find listed under this search.

If you are buying products through a CSA or farmer’s market and there’s something you really like, ask the farmer what the variety is and make a note of it if it is something you want to try growing yourself.

Another way you can find out what are good varieties to try to grow is to have a look at the best sellers or customer favorites from your seed supplier. If customers keep coming back for more then there’s a good reason!

What’s your tastiest vegetable or fruit variety to grow? Help a gardener out and share your favorite in the Facebook group!

Dig In and Learn More

If this post has started ideas for your garden, be sure to check out these related posts and helpful books:

What is your favorite variety to grow for taste? Let me know over in the Facebook group

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