- Spring is almost upon us,
which means it's time
to start thinking about starting seeds.
I don't know about you
but I have been buying seeds like crazy lately.
I just placed an order so I figured I'd come out
and talk about five to seven of the plants
I'm really excited to grow this spring in 2022.
Jacques, our resident garden hermit,
he's gonna talk about some of his favorites
and then for you colder climate growers we have Chris,
a new addition to the team,
who's also gonna talk about some of this stuff
she's growing up in Vancouver.
My first selection for you, of course, is a tomato,
and it is my favorite tomato
that I grew in the backyard last year.
You may have seen it in our tomato trellis ideas video.
It's called Beauty King.
This one's from Brad Gates out of Wild Boar Farms.
It's a cross between two classic varieties
and it has absolutely one of the best flavors,
one of the best sizes, one of the best productions,
and one of the lowest disease incidences that I've seen
in all the 15 varieties that I grew last year.
Huge, bi-colored, yellow and red striped tomatoes
that really live up to their name.
They are king sized and they are absolutely gorgeous.
And on top of that, they just taste delicious.
A huge beef steak slicer
that will be perfect in your summer garden.
The next crop I have for you is not this giant cabbage here
known as San Juan Cabbagestrano Jr.
This is my successor to the giant cabbage
that I actually failed to grow last year,
so we put this shade cloth up.
We have all sorts of different tips and tricks
that I'm gonna get a huge cabbage this year,
but instead I have you a dwarfing cabbage.
This is Minuet Chinese cabbage.
So you kind of have to like
that Asian green variety of cabbage,
but they're about nine inches tall, somewhat compact,
nice green exterior, darker green,
little bit more light, and yellow, and sweet inside.
It's a mild flavor and it's downy mildew resistant.
So it's a huge, huge favorite of mine this year
because I simply just love Asian greens.
It's not a summer Epic Garden
unless you have some chilies or some peppers.
I actually trialed about 45 to 60 different varieties
of peppers last year
and I have some favorites that came out.
Actually, one of the favorites I'm about to share with you
is one that I didn't have a crazy amount of success with,
but I want to this year.
It's a jalapeno. It's called Farmers Market jalapeno.
Also known as the potato jalapeno
because of the insane amount of what's called corking
on the jalapeno's skin.
This is where you get those little cracks.
Usually those run vertically.
On this Farmer's Market jalapeno,
it's almost like someone took it and wrapped it up
and created all these little scar marks.
Now, you get a nice sweet heat with this.
It's a big jalapeno and it is probably
one of the better jalapenos you're ever going to taste.
I've had the privilege of taste them.
I got mine from Refining Fire Chiles, my friend, Jim Duffy.
I'll put all the links to everywhere we're getting our seeds
in the video description.
Out here in the backyard
I'm sitting right behind my spring wheat crop,
which if you haven't seen it,
we harvested some wheat last year and actually baked it
in to a homegrown fully from scratch loaf of bread.
But I am not talking about wheat for this tip,
I'm talking about asparagus,
a crop that Jacques, our garden hermit,
has had some success with this year.
He actually gave me one of his four spears to eat fresh,
which as a gardener,
that is a gift that you can't underweight,
because asparagus takes at least two years
to get established,
3, 4, 5 to start regularly harvesting off of.
So what I'm thinking about this year
are any of those varieties
that have the word Jersey in front.
Jersey Giant, these types. I'm looking at those.
I may play around with some other ones.
All that to say, I will be buying crowns of asparagus,
not seeds.
I want a little bit faster uptake
for a crop that takes that long.
And I'll be building out a custom asparagus bed,
which you'll see soon here on the channel.
While I sit here in front of my carrot bed,
which I will admit has served me quite well.
I'm pulling out little snackers like this all of the time
and maybe we'll do a carrot guide soon.
I'm going to tell you about a crop
that I have never, ever grown.
That is almost sacrilege that I haven't grown it,
but first of all,
(carrot snapping)
dirt and all, and that is a delicious, crunchy snacker.
The crop that I have never grown is a sweet potato
of really any kind.
I've propagated sweet potato slips.
I have never actually grown it all the way to completion.
This year I'm focused on the Okinawan sweet potato,
which if you take a cross section of,
get this beautiful purple interior.
I really should be finishing this carrot right about now,
not talking with my mouth full,
(carrot snapping)
but I'm so excited about it.
So, we'll be doing a full guide on Okinawan sweet potatoes
or sweet potatoes in general here on the channel.
But now we need to toss it over
to our new garden correspondent, Chris,
up in Vancouver, British Columbia
for some of her picks for your colder climate gardeners.
- Hey, I'm Chris and I am up in Vancouver, BC
and my climate is classic Pacific Northwest
with a lot of moisture and pretty mild to cool temperatures
for most of the year.
And at home, although I do like to grow
the summertime staples like squashes,
tomatoes, beans, and kales,
I like to dedicate a large part of my garden
for more experimental and fun purposes.
So I like to try out different plants
just to see how they grow and also how they taste.
One of my favorite one stop shops for seeds
is Salt Spring Seeds and this year
I picked up two varieties of chickpeas to grow.
So, I know chickpeas don't sound overly exotic
but I'm actually more interested
in how much a chickpea plant can actually produce,
so hopefully we can find out soon.
This first variety is Chickpea of Spello,
and I believe it's an heirloom Italian variety
which is quite high yielding, very tasty,
and the plants are more bushy in habit
as opposed to sprawling,
so it could be a good option for container growers.
And this other variety is Winnifreds Garbanzo,
which is an earlier to mature plant
and the chickpeas are dark brown,
quite small, and very nutty tasting,
so it sounds really delicious.
This next plant is probably the least exotic,
at least for me up here in Canada,
because Canada is one of the world's top producers of oats.
Now, this is gonna be really interesting growing oats
or a cereal crop for consumption
because I've only really grown crops
like barley and rye as cover crops.
So it's gonna be really interesting
to see how these turn out.
So I have four varieties from Salt Spring Seeds:
Baton, Vicar, Terra, and Streaker Hulless.
One of my go-tos for rare and unusual plants
is definitely Small Island Seed Co.,
which is another Canadian grower.
And what I really like about the selection
is that there is a strong perennial plant focus
and many of these plants are also cold hardy.
Now, I'm not talking about the leafy plants
that can withstand some cold.
I'm talking about fruiting plants as well.
And this year I'm really excited to grow Capsicum Flexuosum,
which is a cold hardy chili
which can withstand -15 Celsius or 5 Fahrenheit.
So that's pretty darn cold.
So hopefully the plants can get going.
I really wanna try the fruit
because it's supposed to be really delicious,
juicy, and tropical tasting.
Another really cool plant from Small Island Seed Co.
is the perennial Nine Star cauliflower,
sometimes called Nine Star broccoli for some reason.
So I like to think of this plant
as kind of like a sprouting broccoli,
but instead of the many shoots
of like the broccoli-like florets
you're gonna get these large heads of cauliflowers.
So it's a really cool looking plant.
It gets quite large, so you do need the space,
but definitely worth growing.
And I actually started some last summer
for our fall planting and I was totally choked
when I realized that whole bunch of squirrels
had just decimated the plot.
So definitely gonna be starting more for this year.
Being in a climate that sees frost towards November,
I like to make sure that I choose plants
that are either able to withstand a bit of cold temperature
or have a shorter growing window.
So this is especially important
if you're growing squashes or melons.
So I like to source my seeds from areas
that actually get frost a little bit before I do
and this year I chose to buy my melon seeds
from Greta's Family Gardens.
And they're out in Quebec which does get colder
before I do here on the west coast.
So three types of melons.
And these are supposed to be well adapted
to cooler temperatures and also a shorter growing season.
Got Montreal melon, which is a green flashed muskmelon,
Sweet Siberian, which is a creamy
apricot fleshed watermelon,
and also Farthest North, which is a smaller fruiting melon
that is supposed to ripen in as little as 65 days.
And those are just a few of the plants
that I'm really excited to start from seed this year,
mostly because I've never grown
those specific varieties before
and I'm really excited to see how they actually turn out
and how they look in the garden, and how they behave,
and of course, how they taste.
- Now that Kevin's talked about
what he's excited to grow this year I wanna show you
what I'm excited to grow.
And I think I've put together a very interesting mix
of flavorful unique items
that maybe a lot of you guys haven't seen before.
Let's just get straight into it and talk about this guy.
And I actually have an example of it
growing in the garden right over there.
Bietola de Costa Fine, which is an Italian variety
and it's actually significantly sweeter
than any other chard that I've ever had.
It still has some of that salty flavor
but it's got like no bitterness.
It's delicious sauteed. It's even good raw.
Where I got this from is actually
a really cool seed company called Adaptive Seeds.
They have all these really neat, interesting seeds,
that they've been developing, protecting,
and sort of cultivating of all sorts of heirloom varieties
from across the world.
If you guys haven't ever run into them before,
I highly recommend you check 'em out.
They've got a big list of unique heirloom seeds.
(chard crunching)
As I was looking around the garden
trying to decide where I would be excited to grow this year,
I realized that the snapdragon
is one of the only flowers I have growing right now,
so I needed to step up my flower selection
and that's why this is on the list.
This is a Cactus Mix Zinnia from San Diego Seed Company.
We love San Diego Seed Company.
They have such a great selection
of sort of regionally adapted seeds,
both flower and vegetables,
but the reason why I chose this one is that A,
I like Zinnias, they do do really well here,
and B, I love this kind of ruffled petal look,
and also that orange red color,
I'm a total suck for when it comes to flowers.
So this is my flower
that I'm most excited to grow this year.
So here I am in my winter cabbage patch of 2022
and what will almost certainly be the future site
of tomato jungle 2022.
And in my hands I hold $30 worth of seeds.
I did not misspeak. These two seed packets are $15 each.
The reason why I decided to grow these two $15 seed packs
is that they're hybrids that have what have been described
as a superlative taste and appearance
comparable or exceeding heirloom quality tomatoes.
So one of these is a copy of a French heirloom
and the other one is a copy of a Cherokee purple.
The names are Marbonne and Marnero.
And the reason why I wanted to try these
is that they have increased yield,
way more disease resistance.
So the idea is that if I have to pay a dollar a seed
but in exchange I get the equivalent tomatoes
from five plants,
to me that's totally worth it,
because in the end I'm still gonna be net positive
on my dollars per pound on tomatoes, if you will.
And also beyond that, it saves me a ton of space.
If I could get away with one plant
that'll produce the same as two, three, maybe more,
then that's a huge win
when you're dealing with a small space.
So these two tomatoes, I'm extremely excited to grow,
and we'll also be sure to keep you guys updated
on whether $15 seed packets are worth it.
The next seed on my list is a brassica family member
and this is called Spigariello.
I can't promise you I pronounce that right.
I'm not Italian. I don't speak it.
But it hails from Italy, just like that green chard,
and what it is, it's actually a relative to the broccoli,
or it is actually in the broccoli family.
And instead of producing these nice florets
that we love to eat,
it actually produces a ton of the foliage.
And instead of being these bigger fan leaves
like broccoli is like, for instance, this one here,
it'll be a bunch of tiny spiraled leaves.
I had this in a dish at a restaurant
and as soon as I took a bite of it I was like,
"I need to know how I get this,"
like finding in the grocery store,
you're probably not going to.
So I hunted down some seeds
and this is actually a new company to me.
It's called Siskiyou seed company.
Believe they're up in the Pacific Northwest.
And so I'll try them out, see what it's like,
but I'm very excited to grow this,
because, man, I gotta tell you,
the sauteed greens, absolutely delicious in a pasta dish.
You may be asking yourself
why am I sitting in front of a chicken coop
when I'm talking about seeds.
Well, that's because with this one,
I think there's a 50/50 chance
that either I'm gonna eat everything
or these chickens are gonna get to clean up after me.
And that's because it's a special type of tomatillo
called the Queen of Malinalco.
We'll be sure to put some pictures up,
but basically it grows more similar to a Roma tomato,
so it's elongated.
It still has that husk just like any tomatillo would,
but it has a sweeter flavor.
So that's the part where I'm not really sure
if I'm gonna like it.
I've seen it described in really delicious ways.
It can be used fresh in salsas.
It can be cooked into sauces.
So I'm very excited to try it out.
And this actually comes from Richard
over at Small Island Seed Company.
He's been on the Epic Gardening podcast before,
really interesting story, a lot of interesting seeds.
I highly recommend you guys check it out.
If you know me,
you know that I like to grow for flavor first
and this year I'm actually replacing
all of my summer squash with one variety.
And that is the Center Cut squash from Row 7 Seed Company.
Row 7 seed company, if you haven't heard of 'em,
they don't have that many things to offer
because they only offer things
that chefs and restaurants would want.
They're growing entirely for the flavor
and cooking aspect of vegetable use.
So the Center Cut squash, just to describe it quickly,
it's a Tromboncino type,
so it's one of those that usually get really long
but you actually harvest it when it's only about this big.
And if you're comparing a zucchini or standard summer squash
to the Center Cut squash, there's just no comparison.
This thing is nutty, it's creamy. The texture is amazing.
It's basically, entirely, changed the game
for zucchini and summer squash for us.
I'm not planning any other zucchini.
I might do one Lebanese, 'cause those are delicious too.
But if you don't like zucchini
or if you're a big zucchini fan,
I highly, highly, highly recommend
that you try this Center Cut squash from Row 7 Seeds.
As promised, I have a bonus selection here.
These are actually seeds from Bulgaria.
You could see,
you probably can't really read the seed packet.
I am actually Bulgarian myself.
And what I have here are some eggplants, watermelon,
and very, very important, tomatoes and peppers.
Bulgarian tomatoes and peppers, hands down, by far,
best I've ever had in my life,
so I'm very excited to try to grow some of these this year.
I can't fit everything in the garden
but I'm definitely going to be trying a couple from each
and I'm very excited to see the results.
So let's go back to Kevin
and thanks for checking out my seeds.
- Three growers, three different sets of plants
to get you excited about growing this season,
really no matter what climate you're in.
Let me know what you thought at some of Chris's suggestions
and what kind of topics you wanna see from Chris coming up,
because she has a background in horticulture
that Jacques and I actually don't possess.
We're both self-taught growers.
And we wanna do a little series with her
called Digging Deeper where she goes really deep
into some of these horticultural topics
that provide some extra context
for some of our running gun garden antics
here on the channel.
So I'm super excited to have her. Hope you guys are too.
Until next time,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.