Winter chore

Some people like to leaf through fashion or interior design magazines, my favourite literature is vegetable catalogues. Selecting new varieties for the coming growing season is the perfect job for those dark December and January days, as it helps to prevent winter blues.

Since most seed packages contain hundreds or even thousands of seeds, I haven’t used up many of them. I have also harvested seeds from some self-pollinating and heirloom varieties. So I don’t need to order that much.

However some varieties have been disappointing and I will try others this year;

Tomatoes: Roma VF - lots of diseases
Cauliflower: Erfurter - not one nice cauliflower produced
Borecole: Westlandse Winter - not hardy enough for cold Slovakian Winters
Celeriac: Dolvi - even after 8 months mine still had small tubers


Others will definitifly stay, like:
Red beet: Egyptische platronde - sweet, productive, early
Tomato: Matina - tasty, productive, early
Potato: Viola - productive, healthy crop, tasteful
Courgette: Di Nizza - compact plants, many tasty small fruits
Lettuce Fisby/fristina - from Spring to Autumn very productive

And these new ones will be tested this year:
Cauliflower: Dalton
Borecole: Reflex (very hardy variety)
Celeriac: Monarch
Spinach: Bazaroet (for Summer production)
Sweet pepper: Nocturne and Sweet Pickle

And we got a whole range of new tomatoes since we love tomatoes, and we want to grow and eat more different varieties! It is self-pollinating plant so seeds will be easy to be reproduced. I ordered the new seeds from Diana: she offers an amazing range of interesting varieties almost for free. Click here to visit Diana’s website. Her website is in Dutch, however ‘google translator’ should bring help for non Dutch-speakers: Diana does ship packages abroad.

This is my selection for 2010:
Reinhard’s Goldkirsche
Gardener’s Delight
Fence Row Cherry
Yellow Taxi
Polish Linguisa
Granny Smit
Mandarin Cross
Caro Rich