Garden Annual Seed List

admin March 10th, 2011

What’s all this here?

These are the varieties of plants available through our CSA.  These are all plants we’ve tried ourselves and had good luck with - we’re not experimenting on you, although if you would like us to offer something you love, let us know!  We’re always interested in expanding our listings (and Sharon always likes excuses to buy more seeds! ;-) ).   We’re open to custom orders as well, so please ask if there’s something you’d really like.

These are our annual vegetable seeds.  Perennial vegetables, Medicinal herbs, and Native Plants are on this page (Link Not Yet Active)

Do you use organic seed?

Whenever possible, seed is organic.  Seed Sources are mostly Fedco, Johnny’s, Baker Creek and a smattering of others, as well as some of our own saved seed.  We do not grow out Seminis/Monsanto Varieties.  If you’d like to know the specific source for a seed, just email.

Why the hybrids?  Aren’t we all supposed to be using Open Pollinated Seeds?

There are a lot of good reasons to prefer OP seeds - you can save seed, you preserve our  heritage, you’ll have seed if you need it.  But there is a place for some  hybrids - sometimes hybrid varieties can get you something you simply can’t get with open-pollinated varieties - either a flavor, disease resistance, or perhaps earliness.  We find this is particularly an issue with peppers and cole crops - it is hard to get a really good open pollinated early broccoli or a brussels sprout with big sprouts using OPs.  Sometimes the OP peppers just don’t ripen up here on the hillside.  So we use the best hybrids lightly, to do things that can’t be done with OP varieties, and recognize that our practices would be different under different circumstances - sort of the way we enjoy a freezer now, but wouldn’t have one in a crisis.  We still save seed, we still engage in other best practices.  There are plenty of OP plants here - the vast majority - so no one who doesn’t want hybrids will need to order them.

What about heirlooms?

An heirloom variety is one that is more than 50 years old.  We believe strongly in preserving older varieties, and many of our plants are heirlooms.  If you are looking for an all-heirloom garden, check out our main CSA page!  The majority of our plants are open pollinated, and many are heirlooms.

I don’t see Bok Choy?  Why not?

A lot of nurseries sell transplants of plants that don’t really transplant all that well - then when they sulk because their roots were disturbed or go immediately to see, you blame yourself.  We do not sell plants that are better direct seeded.  We will do special orders for early transplants of squash and melon provided in plantable pots (coir or newspaper) or in seed blocks (email for details) but generally speaking, we think these do better direct seeded.

How many of each plant do I have to order?

You can order as few as one - if you have a small garden, that may be all you need.  Mix and match to get what you want!

Early Season Garden Plants: Availability Mid-April to Mid-May

First, the early season Garden!  These are plants you can actually put in the ground well before our last frost date!  Reliable producers, they love our climate because they are cold hardy.  Too many of us don’t put in anything until late May, and then miss the chance to eat delicious greens from their garden before everyone else!

Note - All Annual flowers are listed under the warm season plants, but some, including sweet alyssum and potted nasturtiums are available in April and May.  See individual plant listings below.  Also, broccoli, kale, collards and many lettuces are also available for summer and fall planting as well!

Broccoli

Limba Broccoli

Fiesta Broccoli

Early Cabbage

Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage

Chard

Bright Lights Chard

Kale and Collards

Rainbow Lacinato Kale

Lacinator (Dinosaur) Kale

Lettuce

Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce
Red Salad Bowl Lettuce
Cracoviensis Lettuce
Green Deer Tongue Lettuce
Really Red Deer Tongue Lettuce
Lingua di Canarino Lettuce (Canary Tongue)
Hyper Red Rumple Waved Lettuce
Italienischer Lettuce
Dark Lollo Rossa Lettuce
Forellenschluss Lettuce

Mesclun Mix

Other Greens

Mizuna

Leek

King Richard

Bleu de Solaize

Scallions

Evergreen Hardy White

Culinary Herbs:

Curly Parsley

Flat Leaf Parsley

Chives

Garlic Chives

Warm Season Plants:

Tomatoes: The Queen of the Garden!

Glacier - Best early tomato ever!  If you want delicious tomatoes in July (we try for 4th of July) in upstate NY, you need Glacier.  It also does fabulously in containers, being determinate.

Cosmonaut Volkov - Early, delicious red - and love that name!  Good in containers, very cold tolerant, fruited well in the terrible year of 2009.

Jubilee - Gorgeous yellow slicer, so delicious!

Cherokee Purple - Rich, large, delicious, heirloom - I think they are better than Brandywine!

Rose de Berne - Pink, sweet and flavorful mid-season red heirloom!

Bread and Salt Tomato - Pinkish orange large slicers from Russia, lovely and productive, can be grown in containers.

Pink Brandywine - This is the famous, amazing Brandywine.  Not super-productive but every bite is worth it.

Tiffen Mennonite - The Perfect Red Summer Slicer, a little on the later side, but always produces well for us.  This may be my favorite red tomato.

Blau Kazakhstan - Pink and huge, it has a great flavor even if it has a weird, misshapen appearance.  Don’t judge the book by its cover.  It is very productive here!

Paul Robeson - Dark, rich, not too big a plant, so it can be grown in tomatoes, reliable and productive, there’s nothing to like about this beauty!  This is a classic - everyone who grows it loves it!  It produces plenty of nice sized beefsteaks.

Vorlon - A Bulgarian heirloom, it has that quintessential Black tomato taste - rich, almost smokey.  Not a big tomato, but vigorous vines!

Old German - Stripey, beautiful and lovely - late but slicing into one of these rainbow beauties makes it feel like summer could go on forever.

Ruby Gold - Late season sweet slicer with true golden stripes and mottling inside.

Orange Flesch Purple Smudge - Exactly what it sounds like, this is about the most beautiful tomato on the planet - bright orange with a purple top.  Everyone will be stunned - also sweet, bright flavored and juicy, and fairly early - a medium sized slicer of great merit!

Bread and Salt Tomato - This 2010 trial for us was a complete star - a Russian heirloom well worth having, nice bright sweet true tomato flavor, very, very productive, very reliable, crack free when the rains finally came.  A great container tomato as well.

Be My Baby Cherry - We tried these for the first time last year - delicious and productive.

Black Cherry - With that wonderful black tomato flavor - the best tasting cherry tomato I’ve ever eaten.   They do very well in containers, and are very productive.

Sungold Cherry (hybrid) - I know, I don’t love hybrids myself, but this is the sweetest cherry on the planet and dried, tastes just like dried apricots.  I’m a junkie - I can’t help it!  Nice and early, productive in containers, delicious.

Sungold Select II -  A breeding project to dehybridize Sungold produced these, which while not quite as tasty, are delicious, productive orange cherries that look like sungold and are almost as good. Unlike sungold, which gets past its prime pretty early in the season, its flavor held well into the autumn.  Very much recommended.

Principe Borghese - Both a cherry and a paste tomato as well, Principe is prolific even in the worst seasons, and it also is the best drying tomato ever!

Peacevine Cherry - If you want a red cherry that is just plain *laden* down to the ground with clusters of fabulous fruit, this is the one for you.

Opalka Paste Tomato - This is my personal all-time favorite paste tomato - rich, big and delicious.

Hog Heart Paste - Nice and solid, lots of meat and good flavor - these produced well in wet and dry years, just an old reliable for canning and preserving.

Speckled Roman Paste - These are striped, sunny and gorgeous medium sized paste tomatoes with a bright flavor.  Who can resist a striped tomato?

Orange Banana Paste - Want to make delicious orange ketchup or tomato sauce?  These are alway prolific and productive, and they are much sweeter than most paste tomatoes.  One of the best tasting tomatoes I know.

Hot Peppers: Total Pepperhead here!  It can be tough to get the most heat out of these - they like it dry, hot and a bit water stressed for maximal heat, and of course, some years we’re cool, wet and waterlogged.  But there are a lot of things you can do - grow them in containers, save your sunniest, best drained spot, surround them with stones to retain heat.  They are worth it!

Julav an Attitude Hot Pepper: Almost a jalapeno, but fruitier, a bit bigger, earlier and better flavored.  These are great in salso!

Korean Dark Green Pepper: The quintessential kimchi pepper - if you love the stuff as much as I do you will have to grow these hot, delicious little peppers for hotting up your chinese cabbage.  Nice, productive plants are pretty and do very well in containers.

Pasilla Bajio - Reasonably early, rich, pepper that turns brown on ripening.  Great for mole, little heat but terrific flavor.  Very productive.

Serrano Tampequino - Hot and clean tasting, with that characteristic “I am salsa” flavor, these do fairly well for me, although they make it clear that this is a cooler climate than the one they were bred to.  Not super productive, but worth it for the salsa!

Beaver Dam Hot Peppper

Fish Pepper - This is stunningly beautiful, the most ornamental of all peppers, with its variegated foliage.  Gorgeous in containers with blue or purple flowers.  The peppers are moderately spicy and traditionally served with fish.  A famous African-American heirloom.

Early Jalapeno - Hot, delicious jalapeno flavor, perfect for salsa or stuffing, gorgeous netting, great taste, very productive, doesn’t mind the coolth in our summers.  A must have!

Ho Chi Minh Pepper: Bright yellow, friendly little peppers that entice you to eat them whole -and make you regret it!  These are perfect for tossing into stir fries or making your own sambal olek.

Czech Black

Hot Portugal: Not super hot, just the right amount for flavoring pickles or tossing in a stir-fry - cayenne looking without cayenne heat, and better flavor.

Bulgarian Carrot Chili: Vibrant orange with a sweet, fruity delicious flavor, these make fabulous hot sauce and are great dried.  Quite hot, but very multi-purpose.  Prolific, ornamental, container friendly and easy to grow.

Sweet Peppers: We live in a chilly place, and my emphasis is on the most productive varieties for our region!

Tangerine Sweet Pimiento: These are fabulous - sweet and delicious, and very productive even in our cold climate!  You can’t have too many of these round, bright orange peppers.

Albino Bullnose: These are an old, old heirloom with good flavor, cold tolerance and productivity.  The peppers aren’t large, but they are tasty.  They don’t always make it to red, but have a creamy, sweet taste even in their pale stage.

Odessa Market Pepper: A very cold tolerant green-to-orange-to-red variety, very nice tasting peppers and the plants are just loaded down.

Jupiter: These are big, blocky, sweet peppers of the sort everyone dreams of.  Maybe a touch late for the northernmost areas, but most years we get red.  An old commercial variety, they have very, very thick walls and are sturdy.

King of the North  - These are small, but productive and reliable in even the coldest summers.  If anything ripens red, these will!  Perfect for containers, and for the most northerly spots.

Alma Paprika Pepper - They are a good roaster and a lovely tasting sweet pepper, but their principle use is dried, for the most delicious sweet paprika you’ve eaten!

Amish Pimento - Small, round and red with some of the best flavors out there, these are very productive and delicious, and do great in containers.

Jimmy Nardello’s Frying Pepper - These are best fried with olive oil and salt, but are good in salads and stir fries as well - sweet, delicious, productive, an Italian-American heirloom for Connecticut.

Eggplant

Swallow - hybrid - Small but oh, so early and perfect.  If you’ve never been able to get eggplant to do well for you, try swallow.  Very productive.

Rosa Bianca - Big, delicious and fabulous, the best tasting eggplant on earth (in our opinion, of course).  A little late for the Adirondacks and most northerly regions, but worth trying! Large, pale pink and purple.

Pingtung Long - The best asian eggplant, delicious stir-fried with garlic sauce and thai basil.  Moderately productive, very early.

Rosita - Beautiful pink and white eggplants that look just like jewels - a truly ornamental edible.  Very productive, reasonably early, absolutely tasty.

Basil: Basil should technically go in with the culinary herbs, but we use so much of it and grow so many, it gets its own section.  There’s nothing like the smell of basil to bring summer home!

Genovese Basil - The classic, bright, pesto basil - just keep pulling the flowers off and it will produce all summer long.

Sweet Dani Lemon Basil - The lemony flavor is wonderful with fish or chicken, in tea or anywhere - ummm.

Thai Basil - This is the perfect stir-fry basil, aromatic and spicy and delicious.

Purple Ruffles Basil - This is a gorgeous ornamental that will also turn your basil vinegar purple.  Use it in the flower garden or in salads or sliced on yellow tomatoes for the perfect color contrast.

Aramato Basil - This compact little basil is fragrant, delicious and perfect for pots.  Very ornamental!

Annual Flowers: Our emphasis is on flowers that are beautiful and useful - our flowers attract pollinators or are edible, work as useful companion plants or may have medicinal properties.  Many are cottage garden favorites, old heirlooms or classic varieties.

Queen Sophia Marigold - Dark red and double, beautiful

Tangerine Gem Marigold - Tasty edible flowers, tiny bright marigolds, what’s not to love

Vanilla African Marigold - I like the white ones, what can I say?  And I love the history of the struggle to breed a white marigold.  This is buttercream colored, but that’s pretty awesome!

Harlequin - my favorite french marigold, striped golden and beautiful.

Red Heart Calendula - “Pot marigolds” are one of my favorite flowers - and edible and medicinal as well.  These are a beautiful mix of red and oranges.

Resina Calendula: These are the best for medicine production, and pretty besides!

Wizard Coleus Mix: I love to mix these colorful foliage plants underneath edibles in container gardens - they look great under peppers and eggplants, or with bright lights chard.

Carpet of Snow Sweet Alyssum - fragrant and beautiful, sweet alyssum looks good and smells good all year round.  It is also one of the best pollinator attractants out there - they are covered with bees and other native pollinators!  Don’t forget to add some to your garden.

White Queen Cleome - A related wild cleome relative was traditionally the fourth sister in western “three sisters gardening” so we’ve been adding this pollinator attractant to our three sisters gardens, and have found better squash yields, as things do get pollinated more easily.

Love Lies Bleeding - Ornamental and edible, the leaves make a decent spinach substitute, and it is just a beautiful plant with long red dreadlocks!

Panorama Red Shades Bee Balm - I love bee balms - I love the way they draw in insect pollinators, I love the bright color they throw out into the landscape, I like the way the flowers taste in salads and their medicinal properties.  These are lovely!

Blue Ageratum - A fabulous pale blue attractant of butterflies, bees and everything else - gorgeous for cutting as well.

White Ageratum - The White form of the above.

Jewel Mix Nasturtium - The Prettiest, yummiest plant ever!

Long Season Staples: These are Crops that Go into the Ground for a long time, to produce in fall:

Falstaff Brussels Sprout

Brilliant Celeriac

Frigga Savoy Cabbage

  • Comments(1)

One Response to “Garden Annual Seed List”

  1. Gene Purdum says:

    Sharon - check out the Wow variety of tomato available at Fedco - it’s supposed to be an open-pollinated version of Sun Gold. It’s not listed in their printed catalog but is available on the website.

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