New Veggie Varieties to Try This Year

For what seems like 8 million years, I have grown ‘Tomatoberry’. It’s a small cherry tomato variety that is not rare or superflashy, but it works well for me, so I stick with it. My gardening friends are similar: They plant the same varieties year after year because those varieties are proven performers and they don’t want to mess with what works. But when you rock the boat a bit, you occasionally stumble upon a new variety that is just as great, or perhaps even better, than the old standbys. That’s how I ended up replacing my ‘Sweet 100’s’ cherry tomatoes with ‘Tomatoberry’ many years ago. The following options may not be brand-new, but they have proven themselves to be  reliable “newer” vegetables, and they might be good additions to your garden this season.

I loved the spot-on description of this lettuce provided by the staff at Territorial Seed: “Imagine dipping a paintbrush in red paint and giving it a hard shake onto your romaine lettuce.” This is a gorgeous headed lettuce, but the succulent, slightly sweet leaves are not as bitter or tough as those of traditional romaine. The heads are slightly looser, too, which allows you to pick the outside leaves for smaller salads before the head fully develops (in 55 days). This variety also resists downy mildew, lettuce-drop disease, and mosaic virus.

If you have trouble with peppers (and I do), ‘Cupid’ might be a good choice next season. Although the plants are rather large, they produce scores of miniature bell peppers early in the season (they mature to green in 55 days and to red in 75). It’s a disease- and sun-scald-resistant variety that keeps producing right into fall. I was shocked to see Fine Gardening assistant editor Carol Collins’s plants still filled with fruit