Registry helps Michiganians find the best veggies to grow
Cornell Vegetable Varieties for Gardens makes it into the Detroit News…
Saturday, January 13, 2007
By Jeff Ball: The Yardener
While there used to be many good reasons to have a vegetable garden in the back yard, now there is only one.
Years ago, one grew vegetables to save money. It was cheaper to grow your own in most cases. We grew our own 20 years ago because we wanted fresh organic produce free of the pesticides found on most vegetables and fruits in the grocery store. We had our own veggie patch because we wanted fresh. Most produce in the grocery store came from Florida or California.
All those reasons have disappeared. You don’t save much money growing your own any more. You can get very fresh organic fruits and vegetables at the many farmers markets that have popped up all over southeastern Michigan.
So why do I have a vegetable garden? There is still one reason for me to keep planting that vegetable patch each spring. I can still grow vegetables that taste better than anything I can buy at the farmers market. Yes, I get fresh and organic, but it is that taste and that mind-blowing flavor that I can’t get any other way.
Unfortunately, there has always been a major problem finding the varieties of each vegetable that will in fact taste better than the produce at the market. The reality is that every variety of tomato sold as seed or as a seedling does not grow equally well in every state in the union.
Every variety has a preferred region where it will grow to its genetic potential. Only in that preferred geographic area will it have its most outstanding flavor, its highest level of nutritional value, and grow with the most vigor reducing chances of disease and insect attack.
The problem is that no one will tell you which of the 400-plus varieties of tomatoes for sale in this country will be happiest growing in southern Michigan. In the seed catalogs, all varieties are described as totally wonderful and all taste terrific, thank you very much.
Most experienced veggie growers will tell you that it takes years and years of testing many different varieties of each vegetable to find the “best” varieties for their garden; the varieties that taste the best. That testing process might have been fun 30 years ago when folks had more time to play around with, but with today’s time pressures, that approach to finding the best varieties is ridiculous. Someone needs to tell us which is best.
Now there is a program that promises to give us that valuable information in the next few years. Called the Vegetable Varieties Project For Gardeners, this Web site is run by the folks in the Horticulture Department of Cornell University, www.veg varie ty.cce.cornell.edu.
You register on the free site giving your state and county. Then you are free to rate any varieties of any vegetable you have grown in your garden. More than 1,300 gardeners from 40 states have registered so far and have offered thousands of ratings.
Lori Bushway, the director of the project, says, “Now that the software is in shape, we are working to register hundreds of thousands of gardeners, offering their geographically based ratings of the thousands of varieties of vegetables that are out there. Then we will have a very exciting and valuable database.”
What that will mean is when you want to find the best cucumber for Michigan, you can go to the Cornell site and get the name or names of those varieties of cucumber that other Michiganders have found to be superior in taste. You can read their opinions. You also can find those varieties that did not do so well.
You can get data for bush cucumbers as opposed to spreading cucumbers. You can find out which are best for pickles and which are best for salads. What this program does is reduce the chances of your making a mistake in choosing the varieties of cucumber in your Michigan garden.
But we need lots of Michigan gardeners registered for this project. So I hope all of you veggie growers out there will join this project and help build the database of what are the best varieties of veggies to grow in Michigan.
No more trial and error stuff for me. I want to get it right the first time, and in a few years, I will be able to plan my garden with the confidence that all my veggies will have outstanding taste.
The Yardener Jeff Ball, a Metro Detroit free-lance writer, has authored eight books on gardening and lawn care. You can visit his yard care Web site at www.yardener.com, and his blog at http://gardener yardener.blogspot.com. E-mail him at jeffball@usol.com.
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007701130403
Lori Bushway | Articles for the public, Resources