It's fascinating how changes in gardening attitudes and milestones in plant breeding are reflected in this year's seed catalogue vegetable offerings.
For instance, organic seed is becoming so much in demand that Veyseys is itemizing all its organic catalogue seed in an extra 150-item listing. Our local Saltspring Seeds has always offered organics, but seeing organics getting attention in mainstream catalogues too is heartening.
Heirloom seed is more often featured and now gets more prominent attention in catalogues. These include top performers such as the hardship-tolerant and prolific squashes: Table Queen and Waltham Butternut. Another favourite is Cylindra beets, which over the years remain easy-to-grow, a snap to slice and quick to harvest.
Saltspring Seeds has always focused on organic heirlooms. However, in Canada-wide catalogues, it's good to remember that just because something is heirloom doesn't mean it will do well in your particular region unless it was developed there.
For instance, warmweather crops from areas back east (heirloom or not) can fail miserably here in B.C.
One of the most exciting developments in the last few years is the advent of blight-resistant tomatoes. The Mountain Magic largecherry tomato, which tastes good and was so successful for me last year, is available in many catalogues now. Veyseys has hit the blightresistant jackpot for me this year with Mountain Magic, Defiant and Plum Regal.
The needs of container gardeners are getting more attention with development of compact-size vegetables.
These include the hybrid Cucino cucumber from Dominion and from T&M, which is said to be ideal for containers, as is the Patio Mix of tennis-ball-size eggplants white, deep purple and violet.
For people with no garden space whatsoever, seed-sprouting is one of the few ways of growing fresh salad material. Dominion Seeds has devoted two whole pages to seeds for sprouting plus a sprouter said to produce sprouts in 72 hours.
Runner beans are always a great, flowerful and edible privacy screen that can be grown in containers for balcony gardeners. But they do need bees for pollination, whereas pole beans don't.
This means people with pollination problems or those who prefer the taste of pole beans may prefer the esthetics of coloured pods. William Dam offers three diverse pole beans: the purple Blauhilde, the yellow Neckargold and the green-podded Blue Lake.
More shallots are gradually becoming available from seed. T&M are offering three this year: Eschalion Zebrune is said to store well, and so is the red-skinned Camelo. The third is the Prisma F1 hybrid.
There are some opportunities to diversify with zucchinis. There are compact or "bush" zucchinis, as opposed to "open" zucchinis, and zucchinis such as Anton (Veyseys), which grow on upright stems.
T&M also have an interesting take on squash. The little Hooligan F1 hybrid is just 7.5 by five centimetres. Apparently one can slice off the top, remove the seeds, replace the top, microwave for four minutes and eat.
Send garden questions to [email protected].
