Every Flower & Vegetable That's Going into My Garden This Year

I've been meaning to write this post for the past 10 years. Every single variety of flower and vegetable I'm planting. Finally, this year I had time to do it and the reason for that is a bit of a shocker.

This year to get my gardening season on track I did the unthinkable. I hired someone to help me weed my garden. The opportunity was dropped in my lap and I took it.

A gardening friend is helping a refugee from Uganda succeed in his first year in Canada and she suggested I might want to hire him to weed after she overheard me tell a particularly stubborn weed to go suck a duck.

She said that I needed weeding done and he needed extra money. I took the bait.

I hired Robinson to work with me for 3 hours of weeding and talking the next day. By the end of it 95% of the garden was weeded and I now knew a Ugandan business administrator.

If you don't know, I garden at a community garden in my town. It's modelled after a classic English allotment garden with large plots. It's been an organic community garden since 1978.

Inside its fences you'll find a culturally diverse collection of people with a shared passion for talking trash about voles.

In the photo above, my garden is the one in the centre with the various hoop houses and row covers. To the left of me is a man from Poland, to the left of him there's Penelope from England (who recommended I hire help), and to the left of her there's Ron and his family from Zimbabwe.

In this 40' by 40' plot I grow a lot of food and flowers.

YET I've never done a post that explains every single thing I grow.

Let's start with the flowers.

Zinnia

30 in total

I'm growing out 10 of each variety.

All the zinnia this year are from the Floret Originals collection.

Erin of Floret sent me her entire collection of seeds so the hard part wasn't knowing I'd grow Floret Originals, it was a matter of WHICH ones I was going to grow. I chose Alpenglow for its iridescent qualities and Victorian Wedding because of the wide range of fluffy sherbert colours. Unicorn Mix will add strong colours when I want them for arrangements.

Dahlias

30+ in total

I talked all about this year's dahlia choices in this post. I have multiple tubers of a lot of them with half going into my front yard English Cottage Garden and the rest in a bed at my community garden.

Amaranth

15 in total

Planting 5 of each variety.

Amaranth self seeds at an alarming rate. If you grow it once you'll grow it forever. This is more true of certain varieties (Opopeo is an unstoppable self seeder, Green Tails is less reliable). If you're careful with digging in the spring and give them time, thousands of seedlings will show up where you grew them the year before. Hot Biscuits is my favourite for its shape, colour and abundant blooms.

Cosmos

12 in total

6 of each variety.

Cranberries cosmos is a "Double Click" variety that has double petals compared to the single petal look of Apricotta. The two varieties share their colours, with yellow centres and the cranberry colour picking up in the centre of the Apricotta cosmos. In other words, they'll look good together.

The Rest

1. Garden Mignonette - an heirloom plume type flower with a heady vanilla scent
2. Green Hairy Balls - also known as balloon flower are just fun to grow.
3. Eucalyptus - This is a slow grower I planted late but I've always wanted to grow it!
4. Chocolate Lace flower - This will also reseed itself and I love the lacy airy look it has in the garden and arrangements. The colours are remarkable.
5. Scabiosa - Even though the flowers are beautiful I'm mainly growing this to use the unformed flowers in arrangements. I like how they look when they're just a ball and haven't yet opened. The colour is a soft, soft peach/cream.
6. Nasturtium - I'm growing this variety of nasturtium for my window boxes, but chose these colours to match my tomato selections. I envision a sliced tomato salad with dark tomatoes like Chocolate cherry and Black Krim topped with the dark chocolatey nasturtium flowers.
7. Petunia - These are the Cosmic Cherry petunias I got from Baker Creek Seeds last year on the promise that they tasted like Cherry. They do not. But they do look good with HUGE petunia flowers.
8. Beaujolais Sweet Pea - A very dark maroon with a sweet smell. These beaujolais seeds were ones I saved from last year and they all germinated.
9. Coleus - This one is a bit off of my colour palette but this AAS winner is absolutely fluorescent and I love it so I'm growing it.
10. Snapdragon - Snapdragons self seed like crazy and will also often grow back from the root. Doubleshot has Chantilly style ruffled petals. Who doesn't love to squeeze the jaws of a snapdragon open?

Vegetables

People always ask what I do with all the vegetables I grow. I eat them.

I grow enough vegetables to feed myself for the year by growing lots of things that store well for long periods and other things that I preserve.

1. Red Onion (Red of Florence) - An easy to grow (they'll bulb up even when other onions croak on you) onion. I also find in general red onions keep much longer than yellow or white onions.
2. Onion (Patterson) - A yellow onion that stores fairly well. They need to be planted when it's still cold out. Around here April is ideal. *

3. Cauliflower (Snow Crown) - An AAS winner that's easy to grow for people like me who are terrible at growing cauliflower. Heat tolerant.
4. Luffah - I've been saving and growing these same luffa seeds for years. Yes Luffas, like the one you scrub with.
5. Swiss Chard (Oriole) - An orange chard.
6. Swiss Chard (Rhubarb) - A dark red chard. In my experience coloured chards never seem to be as large and healthy as the regular white variety.
7. Kale (Black Magic) - This will become gargantuan. It's a good ornamental plant along with being gross kale. I like variety and this variety alone in terms of kale. I use it to make 2 particular salads. A roasted squash and kale salad from Epicurious and this black kale salad I eat every night when it's the season.
8. Jalapeno (Pot-a-peño) - My favourite jalapeno variety based on taste also happens to be my favourite for the amount of size it takes up. Which is very little. A small plant perfect for pots, planters or windowboxes. For me, it has the perfect amount of heat.
9. Beets (Merlin) - From the same vegetable inventor behind Kestrel beets comes Merlin. Really likes cooler nights to do well. All beets are kind of jerks, but Merlin is no bother compared to Boldar.
10. Beets (Boldar) - These are trouble. Boldar are persnickety little brats , but I try to grow them every year because when I happen to succeed I feel all trembly inside. They're delicious, sweet beets that hate germinating, growing, and bulbing up.
11. Lettuce (Bauer) - THIS is the lettuce I grew and loved so much in my Aerogarden that year. I feel like the furl of the leaves makes it a stronger leaf so even very young leaves hold up well in a burger or under salad dressing.
12. Lettuce (Merlot) - Another nice strong frilly leaf, not bitter and even young leaves aren't easily bruised, but the leaves aren't as strong as Bauer.
13. Corn (Serendipity) - I've been on the hunt for a good corn for years and keep returning to Serendipity. It's very sweet and gives 1 cob per plant. The only thing that would make it better is a more robust corn flavour.
14. Zucchini (Black Beauty) - An heirloom zucchini from the 1920s. It has a nice shiney skin and produces well for an heirloom. I also grow Raven sometimes.
15. Rutabaga (Laurentian) - Obviously. I mean did you read my rutabaga post?
16. Cabbage (Farao) - A green cabbage that's slow to do that cabbage exploding from the centre thing. It tolerates heat fairly well.
17. Cabbage (Red Acre) - Just your basic red cabbage that stores well.
18. Strawberries (Audrey) - This is the first year I'll be planting these so I won't really know anything about them until next year. They're reportedly sweet and red. All things I like in a strawberry. Or a raspberry. Or a cherry.
19. Squash (Sweet Mama Kabocha) - A sweet, dry squash that's honestly perfect for everything. I've probably grown more squash varieties than anything else (other than tomatoes) and I always come back to some sort of Kabocha squash. They keep much longer than butternuts, acorns or delicata type squash and they have better texture and flavour.
20. Carrots (Bolero) - Bolero is a big, beefy carrot with a long root. It stores well and ... tastes like a carrot.
21. Carrots (Ibiza Hybrid) - This is a long slender, sort of delicate carrot. Perfect for cooking whole.
22. Pickling Cucumbers (Eureka) - This variety has the best sized, crunchy pickling cucumbers that I've ever grown. They're moderately resistant to bacterial wilt.
23. Dry Beans (Black Turtle) - This is the variety you want to grow if you want to make black bean soup or canned black beans.
24. Sweet Peppers (Shepherd) - Locally grown Shepherd peppers appear once a year in my grocery store. They're always cheaper than other bell peppers but in my opinion they taste as good if not better (sweeter).
25. Sweet Peppers (Red Impact) - An AAS winner in the sweet pepper category, this is my first year growing it.
26. Garlic (Music) - I have to be honest I'm not even sure if all of this garlic is Music. Over the years I kind of lost track of my garlic varieties and now just call them all Music since that is what I had the most of to begin with. I actually have no idea what kind of garlic I'm growing.
27. Cucumber (Sweet Success) - A parthenocarpic cucumber that is supposed to be a very very vigorous producer. Parthenocarpic means the cucumber doesn't need pollination so it can be grown under netting or in a greenhouse. I'm growing this variety in particular for growing square cucumbers. I'm very serious about growing a good square cucumber. That means growing my cucumbers under netting so they don't die at the wings of cucumber beetles just as I'm about to pick my first cucumber. I wanted seedless and a specific size of fruit to grow in these square cucumber forms I bought myself for Valentine's Day.
28. Asparagus (Millennium) - It took me decades to finally plant an asparagus patch so I'm glad I was at least smart enough to plant Millennium. An all male variety with thick spears.
29. Broccoli (Purple Magic) - An AAS winner and this is my first year growing it. What makes it unique is the purple colour not only on the crown of the broccoli but the whole stem as well.
30. Potato (Kennebec) - This is the potato Heston Blumenthal uses for french fries.
31. Potato (Burbank Russet) - This is the potato McDonalds uses for french fries.
32. Pumpkin (Jarrahdale) - It's May 28th as I write this and I just cooked my last Jarrahdale pumpkin last week. IT DIDN'T ROT FROM OCTOBER TO MAY. So yeah. She's a keeper.
33. Sweet Potato (Beauregard) - The best variety I've found for my zone 6b garden. Our season is long and hot enough to grow these to a BIG size either in the ground or preferably in very large pots.
34. Green Beans (French, Emerite) - These are the only fresh bean I grow and I'll never grow any other. A true Haricots Verts bean that's longer and slimmer than a regular bean.

Tomatoes

I cut down from 30 varieties this year to 3.

And then I went to a plant sale and that number went up to 12.

Black Krim - Black Krim are my favourite tomato and I've been growing it for years because of its flavour. Dark tomatoes have an sort of dusky, earthy flavour that typical red tomatoes don't have.

W Hybrid - One of the original releases from the University of Florida, a hybrid tomato that has heirloom taste. Bred for disease resistance and flavour. These were years old seed that took their time germinating but finally did. It's the only plain red tomato I'm growing this year.

Plum Regal - Plum Regal is my preferred paste tomato because it's much more resistant to disease than its counterparts and in a garden that's been organic for almost 50 years that's important. Being a hybrid, it will also produce all its fruit at the same time basically. This is a good thing if you want to pick all of them to make sauce.

San Marzano - The quintessential heirloom tomato that really needs to be grown in Italy to have the characteristics everyone raves about. It's not the seed - it's the soil. But they are a great paste tomato with good flavour and acidity. Being an heirloom it gradually produces tomatoes up until the plant is killed by frost (or more likely blight.)

Green Zebra - My second favourite tomato is the opposite to Black Krim in that it's "zippy". It has a zippy flavour that dances on your tongue.

Purple Zebra - I couldn't grow Green Zebra without trying the 2022 introduction, Purple Zebra. I expect it to have a similar flavour to Black Krim because it's a dark tomato.

Purple Bumblebee - And I couldn't grow a Purple Zebra without growing what looks like it's mini-me, Purple Bumblebee, from Artisan tomatoes.

Sunrise Bumblebee - Another Artisan variety, Sunrise Bumblebee obviously needs to be grown if you're growing Purple Bumblebee. You can see how this goes.

Sakura - A hybrid cherry that is resistant to disease and has huge clusters of tomatoes that stay stuck to the vine, so you can clip off a whole cluster without the tomatoes ping ponging all over the ground.

Sun Sugar - A sweet, crack resistant hybrid cherry tomato that's sweeter than your average red cherry.

Black Cherry - Mahogany fruit that are firm, sweet and complex tasting.

SS100 - This hybrid cherry tomato is a favourite for tomato growers because of how reliable it is and how MANY tomatoes it grows. The SS stands for Super Sweet and it lives up to the name.

I got most of the cherry tomatoes on a whim at my community garden's annual plant sale last week. I had no intention of growing them but apparently I am soooo.

This year will be a cherry tomato taste test year apparently.

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This year, something new in my planting routine will be a scoop of sheep manure compost into each planting hole.

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Now if you'll excuse me, I have some planting to do and voles to track.