12 Must Grow Varieties | New Seeds on the Farm

if you don't experiment with new varieties in your garden then you'll never find the best seeds for your growing conditions so today i'm gonna talk about all of the things that we experimented with last season because i found a lot of things that i don't want to live without in the future here on red roof family farm we grow a lot of food but that doesn't actually mean that i grow a lot of varieties i'm always trying to narrow in my list to the best adapted seeds to my growing conditions we only have two and a half acres here and last season we only grew on about a quarter of an acre so it's a lot easier for me to just learn the specific varieties that i have and to work with succession plantings than to grow a hundred different things one of my biggest goals in 2020 was to narrow down what we were growing even though i tried to not have a huge range in 2019 we had way more than we needed and so because of that i really focused in but there was still some exciting temptations in those seed catalogs that i just had to grow and so this is going to be all of those experiments what didn't work for me and what i really want to grow in the future as you guys may know ian and i were tomato based life forms we are obsessed with tomatoes and 2019 was the year of the tomatoes we had about 50 varieties that we grew a lot of them for the seedling sale but i also wanted to experiment with them myself so i planted at least two of everything we had an amazing mix of stuff and what i learned was a lot of those tomatoes i did not like and a lot of those tomatoes did so poorly i didn't even want to offer them to my customers so following that year 2020 we really narrowed in we brought the list into about 30 that we offered to our customers and i tried to really limit what i planted but you know being tomato based life forms obviously there was stuff that was going to tempt me and so we experimented with three new tomato varieties the first tomato was big dina and we got this from johnny seeds big dina is a high production greenhouse tomato it is one that so many farmers were talking about and i was really excited to grow it for myself and these tomatoes incredible incredible tomatoes it was hard to believe they were real they were so perfect you know like perfectly round perfectly unblemished i personally i hate a mealy mushy tomato and these were nice and firm the way that i love a tomato just the other day i pulled one out of the freezer and when i defrosted it it you know it still had its texture it didn't go completely to mush and so you know i personally really really enjoyed having it and if i could have sold it we would have we would have been growing that from now on it would have been a permanent fixture on the farm unfortunately our customers you know they're a farmers market customer they know they can get a perfect red tomato in the grocery store but they can't get those beautiful unique tomatoes that you can only kind of get from local farms and so this year we are going more in that direction we're only growing pink berkeley tie-dye as large tomatoes for selling at the market which means unfortunately no big dina for me the other two tomatoes that i was super excited to experiment with you guys all know that i am obsessed with juliet and it was pretty easy to sell me on these because they said similar to juliet and that's all i need to hear to have me spending all my money on tomatoes i did red torch and bronze torch and these yet again i got from johnny seeds these are like julia tomatoes if you made them so beautiful that you just couldn't help but staring at them juliet is beautiful to me for its production it's beautiful me for its diversity for being able to cook with it chop it um i love juliet but these oh so beautiful i know lots of people complain about juliet being a mild tomato i personally like a mild tomato um so i enjoy it for that but so the red torch and the bronze torch had a lot more flavor they had more of those you know rich complicated flavors that you expect to get out of uh heirloom heirloom style tomato but they are still in those nice small bigger than a grape smaller than aroma package size that you get out of the juliet so they still had all that diversity that juliet had you could have it as a snacker you could chop it up or you could cook with it they they still hit on all the things i like about juliet and the thing that i like the most about them is i mix them in with my juliet and now i have these beautiful baskets of really unique looking tomatoes both the red torch and the bronze torch are coming back to the farm again this year these are most likely going to be you know permanent fixtures on the farm until something better comes along but i will say if you had to only pick one my preference would be the bronze torch we have very limited amounts of tomato disease here on the farm but i did find on the red torch i was getting some blossom and rot you know i don't know if that is from lack of calcium tomatoes can get it from low calcium in the soil or if they're just disease prone but i did have issues with the red torch whereas the bronze torch zero issues and here on our farm everything else that we grow we have zero issues with this red torch was the only variety we had on the farm this year that had any sort of disease issues next let's talk about lettuce because we talk about lettuce all the time here on the farm we are obsessed with salanova lettuce that you get from johnny's but the salan nova did struggle a little bit in 2019 for us in the heat of summer and i'd heard lots of people discussing muir m-u-i-r lettuce as being like a really excellent variety for that summer heat better better than the salanova with lots of the benefits that i like in the salanova so i had to experiment with it and in fact what we did was we bought the entire uh summer crisp series that johnny's offers so mirror is you know part of that package so we tried them all i think there was about six or seven different varieties following that experiment i'm sold okay i know exactly what everyone's talking about mirror is a beautiful beautiful summer lettuce super tasty nice and nice and heavy makes a good head um also can be done as a salad mix the benefits that i get out of the salanova i was very much seeing in mirror the biggest sell for me on the mirror too was the fact that it held really well in the field i planned to bed other other lettuces even in that summer crisp series were going to seed muir was staying sweet it was staying beautiful it was staying happy throughout that summer heat so i i'm growing it every year from now on it's it's on the must-grow list out of the summer crisp series the only other lettuce that we are bringing back on the farm is magenta magenta had some reddish tones to it so it worked really well to contrast beside the mirror to have you know the visual appeal of two different heads um and then it was the second best at uh being bolt resistant bitter resistant heat summer resistant uh to the mirror so those two held up super well in the bed grew nice and big throughout the heat of summer and they are back on the farm for 2021. another thing that i struggled with in 2019 is that i got some black powdery mildew on my basil and once that happened the crop degraded and i basically didn't have any basil left to sell once we got into the heat of summer you know through into the fall we have very low humidity here in kelowna so i don't struggle very often with mildew on my plants and i know exactly what i did wrong with growing my basil it's the fact that i had the plant spaced at six inches which is very very tight for basil that you know really ideally would like some airflow to keep it disease-free but i'm also trying to get the most money out of my beds as possible so part of our system is planting really densely so i was super excited when i was looking around on the johnny seeds website to see that they had recently introduced a downy mildew resistant uh you know options for basil they had two varieties prosperia and wrecker's devotion off the top of my head i can't remember which one's which but one was a little bit more compact of a plant while the other one was you know a little bit taller i decided to buy both of them to experiment with them to see how they did see if it made a difference and it made a huge difference we did not have any downy mildew problems at all in 2020 and the basel produced and it produced and it produced it kept going all the way till october when we finally had our frosts so one single planting pounds and pounds and pounds of beautiful delicious basil the fact i don't have to rethink my crop planning i don't have to rethink my crop i can just bring in these you know really disease-resistant seeds makes me so happy and they're on the forever list next is beets i really struggle with beets here on our new farm i never had issue growing beets previously but when we did our soil test here we found out we have like zero boron beets specifically are very sensitive to needing boron to grow healthy and happy because of that i've been experimenting with a handful of different beets to see which ones i'm going to be the most likely to be able to grow through my neglect in 2019 i didn't find any varieties that i was really excited about i grew a lot of you know the most popular classics and none of them thrived for me so in 2020 the next variety i decided to experiment with is called kestrel and we got this from william dam seeds which is a siege source only in canada so you'll have to look around to see if this is available where you shop if you're down in the states kestrel grew very well for us it was a very very beautiful beat you know very perfect very round you know not stringy the greens were nice and strong and and pretty looking you know i want the greens to look as good as the roots despite the neglect that i gave it it still did okay for us and and that is you know an impressive showing so i am going to grow this again next year and we're going to look into doing a boron foilier application which should help it go from passable to excellent fingers crossed i love zucchini zucchini is my favorite and we actually make pretty good money and pretty good sales on it here at the farm the main season variety that i grow is dungeo but i wanted to experiment with zucchini coming on a little bit earlier that was going to be grown inside one of our high tunnels and so because of that i needed to consider fruit set at colder temperatures and also pollenization zucchinis the flowers need to be pollinated for the fruit to be viable turn into viable zucchinis so i ended up getting partan on it did all of the features that we needed for it and i was really happy with this plant the doonja zucchinis are excellent they're like the perfect zucchini i can't i can't imagine there ever being a better zucchini than ninja though give me a decade and i'll i'll try to find one um but the parthenon looked exactly the same as the dungeon i found they were a little bit longer the dungeon you know like they ended up being kind of like a little bit skinnier longer but side by side they still were really beautiful zucchinis and the production was really good we only grow three crops in our greenhouses we grow zucchinis the parthenon we grow tomatoes and then finally we grow cucumbers i love tasty green it's a japanese long skinny beautiful cucumber the best we also do diva but when i was looking at cucumbers on william dam seeds and they had martini i i couldn't i couldn't resist i do my best as you all know i do my best to resist these temptations but martini this white little snacker cucumber was too tempting i i couldn't do it i had to buy it it ended up being the tastiest cucumber i've ever had we really struggled to sell it you know it was this like little snacking you know it was like a fat little pickling cucumber is what it looked like but we we gave them away we were constantly like oh you gotta try this this cucumber is so good and everyone who tried it agreed they're like this is the best cucumber i've ever had they you know they just they didn't want to buy it it was too difficult everyone was looking for you know a bigger uh you know english style cucumber for their actual purchase because of that even though this is the best cucumber we've ever eaten ian's laid down the log told me i'm not allowed to grow it for the farm it's just too hard to sell we we need to get it out of the rotation but it was so good i can't i can't not so i bought a i bought a home gardener size pack and there will be a few plants at the end of the tunnel that will be for me to snack on all summer long because they are these are an excellent excellent cucumber another one of our personal favorite crops to grow is eggplant the problem with eggplant is it takes a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of space to get you know a eggplant off a plant but then when you bring it down to market you know ideally you're like i need like eight bucks for this eggplant that was a lot of work a lot of time if if i'm gonna be able to afford to grow these i need to make a lot of money on them and no one no one likes eggplant that much i like eggplant that much i'm excited when it always comes home i didn't want to completely give up on eggplant as being a crop we could grow because it's so good i love it and and you know i'm really passionate about growing it too i love i love the plants i love having lots of them even though we struggle so johnny seeds had these orient series that said we're crazy early super high production and they're also an asian style so they're like a long skinny eggplant which means that it produces more but i could like you know i'm selling one at a lower per price uh price point for at the market so i thought maybe this is something that would work out for us so i bought the two different colors i bought orient express and orient charm and they they were great plants they actually produced a lot i really liked them but unfortunately we you know we still just couldn't sell them there was no complaints on the farm we were drowning in eggplants and we loved it we ate tons and tons of eggplants all summer long and we have a bunch stored up in the freezer but i have to cut them from the farm crop list i'm just i'm not allowed but orient express the purple the purple variety is such an excellent eggplant that i'm bringing it back in i'm going to have you know a handful of plants maybe 15 for our personal consumption because i love eggplant i have to have it and so far this orient express is my favorite eggplant variety i've ever grown another experiment that i've been told we cannot be trying to sell because it just sold so poorly but i highly recommend the seed is we grew green 70d improved we got this from johnny seeds and it is basically a guy land and ian and i love this crop it's it's one of our favorite favorite treats it's everything we love about choy made infinitely better doesn't like the heat but it grew really well for us here in the spring and i've been looking for a guy land that i really like to grow for myself and i've been struggling the ones that i've been finding which have been categorized as choi sum or choi sim they haven't been a thick enough stock i want like a nice uh rapini style stock to my gailan that's what i'm looking for it's it's like a nice nice hefty stock almost uh similar to the the things that are enjoyable about asparagus you know they're sweet and crisp and tender and then you cook them down um they get these rich flavors that that's what uh guy lan is for us and this green 70 was excellent it was it was the perfect plant it was exactly what i was looking for and i was able to do cut and come again on it so i was able to snap off the first stock and then it sent up a couple extras so it actually had a longer harvest season which is nice because it kind of you know it all comes on at once so excellent in my home garden um but unfortunately we just couldn't sell it another plant that i was super happy with in 2020 which unfortunately won't be coming back is we grew sweet peppers for the first time and this was a just random covered experiment we had leftover peppers and we had space so we planted it up we weren't really expecting much out of it and the variety that we grew is like a not exciting find it at the dollar store variety uh california wonder it's just you know generic green pepper you can find it at any store any hardware store when they do veggie seedlings but those peppers produced crazy for us they were they were a really really nice bell pepper nice thick walled uh bell pepper nice flavor on them really high production i was really really happy with the the variety and i was really happy with you know the peppers as an item to add in to our farm sales uh they sold pretty well and for the production that we got you know was it was worth doing it because i'd never thought of sweet peppers as something that would be a money maker for me i'd never really put much thought into it um so this this coming season is going to be the you know experimenting for sweet bell peppers year so i'm bringing in a few different varieties that i'm going to try out here on the farm that should have better production and better disease resistance and just overall a happier plant than the california wonder um but you know i didn't expect very much out of california wonder and it you know more than impressed me with what it did so you know an old classic but for a reason finally i saved this for last because i could basically sum up what the theme for new seeds of 2020 was with hot peppers hot peppers was the huge experiment for the year we grew a lot of hot peppers and i know this video is getting long but backstory we do seedling sales here in the spring and we have been specializing so far in specialty tomatoes we've been bringing in varieties of tomatoes that you maybe can't find anywhere else as being the the reason for people to come and shop with us and what i discovered through those sales is as much as there are people who are as picky as me about tomatoes you know there's like two of us um there is a lot of people who were really passionate about hot peppers and they told me over and over again that they would really like to see me bulk up my hot pepper options so in 2020 we did about 20 different varieties of hot peppers you know they told us they wanted them so we grew them we had excellent sales the hot peppers really did sell very well for us people who liked hot peppers would come and they'd buy one of everything they left with you know 15 hot pepper plants so they did sell well but we were left over with you know about 50 hot peppers a few of every single variety so i figured i better plant these i better see what they're like i better see if everyone was passionate about this specific hot pepper you know we have the market these super hots that i don't normally like maybe i can sell them to people you know it won't be a waste and so i got way more hot pepper experience last year than you i ever expected i would get we were picking hot peppers every single week and the production was pretty good the sales for us weren't great the problem with hot peppers is how many hot peppers do you really need you know most people just like want one or two of those super hots and so we had a high volume we're not complaining we ended up making a bunch of hot sauces so they didn't go to waste um but there's there's a lot that i'm not gonna grow again in the future the first one that's on the me list was one that i was really excited about one of my favorite types of peppers are cayennes i like big large cayennes because i use those to make my hot sauce i i like the bulk of pepper that you get off of the plant and then it not being super spicy it's it's the perfect hot sauce pepper for me so i tried giant ristra this sounded like it was gonna be the best the best pepper for me it was gonna be super high production nice thick walls uh right heat and i just was very underwhelmed by this plant the production was very late um and then the peppers were huge they were like they were massive peppers i can you know when they were in the baskets of peppers they looked like a shepherd's pepper they didn't look like a hot pepper but it produced like two or three of these um through the entire course of the year and the production really happened very late we're zone five obviously if you have a longer season maybe maybe the production ramps up at the very end um but it's not coming back in fact my favorite pepper for doing my hot sauce for the volume of bulk that i get off of it is super old-fashioned classic uh large red thick cayenne i think is what it is i always label it lrt this super good production super good flavor super good bulk great pepper so unfortunately giant wreathstra even though it looks like it might be an improvement it's not coming back we're going back to the original but if you want to talk about good production i was super impressed with crackle chili this one was uh indian chili i think they said it was like a an indian curry chili and the production on this pepper was crazy it was really really good production we were picking them green um but when they ripened to red they they still had a really nice flavor too and the they were you know they they weren't super big but they had a thick wall they actually had some bulk they're not like some of those like really thin skinned chilies that seems like it's just just seeds it's just spice from the seeds so i really really liked this crackle pepper um we only grow a handful of chilies i usually put like two in and then you know that's more than enough for me for the year um but i really like the crackle fresh and i have some that i let ripe into red and dried and they've been great they've been a great chili for cooking one that i harvested absolutely zero of but i loved having it was phyllis blue this is adorable the the foliage on it was it was like black and green colors very very pretty it made this really nice compact you know almost hedging style plant and then it had these little like black blueberry there are these tiny little circles that are so so cute i had a lot of these left over i i did sell them at the seedling sale but it was one of the slower sales um and i ended up doing a wall on one of my decorative gardens like i edged the entire garden with these phyllis blue and they made this they made this really pretty little hedge um so as a decorative i really liked it but the the peppers they the flavor wasn't that exciting it definitely seems like this plant is more intended as a decorative plant than you know an eating plant another one that was similar to the small berries of phyllis blue but this one is definitely uh been designed for flavor not for looks is this funky funky pepper that we got from johnny's i'm gonna say this wrong the quinoa quinoa yellow i don't know it's it's a brazilian pepper they were these like tiny little raindrop shaped peppers and the flavor on them like incredible incredible flavor not a lot of spice um very citrusy zesty very cool very cool pepper um i often would just like pick them and eat them out in the field but we didn't pick very many because the peppers were really really difficult to pick off the plant um they you know you pull on it and they would not snap off um you almost needed to like get snips to get these peppers off the plant and they were loaded they were loaded with peppers but there are these tiny little you know raindrop peppers as i said so they ended up because we had so many other peppers just kind of getting left and forgotten in my home garden i'd probably be really happy to have one of these growing they are a beautiful decorative feature you know i could almost see this in my flower garden um but then they actually are good for eating so it's it's not coming back for me but it's on my recommend list as i said not a huge hot hot pepper fan but the customers who were coming to us for the seedlings wanted us to grow the hottest peppers we could get our hands on so because of that we grew a habanero pepper normally i wouldn't have even bothered to plant it but i had so many people when they were buying it telling me how fun the habaneros are and the plant itself even when they were like these petite little plants they were really pretty so i i got suckered in by all the pepper enthusiasts and i threw a handful of them into my garden and i i will say they like i'm glad that i grew them i did use them the flavor of them is amazing and they had really good production but the production didn't happen until very very very late in our season i can see why pepper enthusiasts they start this pepper super early they start this pepper you know now whereas i'm starting everything kind of into march if this pepper had an extra you know month or two in in the seedling form um before i planted it out into the ground i'm sure i would have just been drowning in habaneros they were loaded with green peppers by the time the the frost came and killed them in october and you know if they would have been able to ripen it would have been an insane amount of peppers the flavor like i can see why people love them the flavor was really really good but they're they're so hot and we tried to sell them out on the stand but overall people were not wanting an entire basket of a habanero they wanted one and so you know we ended up giving them away to customers often but they you know hard sell late production it's just not enough benefits for them to be coming back but saving the best for last guys we have completely changed our minds on hot peppers following our 2020 hot pepper experiment prior to that as i've said earlier the cayennes they were my favorite they were my go-to for hot sauces this was the main thing that i grew but we had lots of requests for hungarian peppers and so we we grew a bunch of those we had two different varieties that we wanted to have for the seedling sale and the hungarians are kind of more middle heat you know a little bit spicier than my cayennes that i've been going to but not not a super hot so we grew two varieties black hungarian and then hungarian hot wax and the black hungarian the picture was like so cool i i was in love with what this pepper looked like so i knew i had to keep some of those for myself and then i grew a lot of the the you know red and yellow hungarian so that one you know we just planted a big batch of them because they were there these peppers are the best tasting hot peppers i've ever had there's for me there's no going back i'm i'm i'm a i'm a hungarian hot pepper convert these like if you're gonna grow one hot pepper these hungarian ones are super i'm drooling thinking about them super rich super tasty the heat isn't super high they made the best hot sauce and having that black one the hot sauce had like just super super cool colors like because it ended up being this dark rich red they also were incredibly productive the peppers you know they weren't they're they're a good size you know kind of similar to a jalapeno and then also similar to the flesh of a jalapeno where it's nice and thick so even though the hungarians weren't as big as these like big oversized cans that i've been growing the bulk that i was getting out of them because of the thick walls was excellent for all these hot sauces that i was making honestly if if i'm going into the future uh there's going to be a lot of hungarians in my garden we love doing these fermented hot sauces and you know the hungarians too they blended you know we blended it with a few other ones and they were just such a base flavor um so sum up peppers pepper of the year hot pepper of the year anything hungarian i highly recommend you try it if you've never tried them before we grew a few other hot peppers you know that we had a handful of jalapenos um but these were all the ones that were new or ones that i had something to say you know i i haven't found my jalapeno of choice yet so i i don't really have anything to say on jalapeno yet i'm still searching one of these days i'm gonna find my dream jalapeno i just haven't found it yet so lots of experiments 20 20 you know even though my my list i narrowed it in i definitely feel like there was a lot of knowledge gained from all these new varieties that i grew i do have you know a whole list of new experiments for the 2021 farm season uh i'm not necessarily going to talk about those because i don't know yet right like i'd rather make this list talking about the experiments from last year where i can give you the end result then to talk about the things that i'm excited about for 2021 i will go over those in my unboxings that are coming up but these are the things that i'm excited about and hopefully these supplement really nicely in with my favorite seeds and i'm gonna do a few more videos on things that we grow and favorite seeds going forward in through the rest of the month too so stay tuned

Channel: You Can't Eat The Grass

Views: 49,309

Keywords: family farm, urban farmer, homesteading, urban homestead, you cant eat the grass, vegetable garden, gardening, permaculture, living off the grid, sustainable living, simple living, seeds, seed shopping

Id: kRnIBIlXHeY

Length: 33min 49sec (2029 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021