Choosing the right vegetables
Plant breeders have done a tremendous amount of work in selecting vegetable cultivars, giving the home gardener a broad spectrum of choice in most crops.
Around the world, plant breeders and seed suppliers constantly strive to supply better and better vegetable selections or cultivars (short for cultivated varieties). Over many years the quality, yield and other characteristics of vegetables have improved with constant breeding work. Today, home gardeners have nearly as ready access to the latest cultivars as commercial growers.
Breeding factors
High yield is a particularly important characteristic for commercial growers, but is not the only factor in breeding work. For example, club root disease-resistant cabbages and cauliflowers have been bred recently and are now available to gardeners. Club root is widespread in allotments, and fungicides to control this disease are no longer available.
Perhaps the most important factor to gardeners – not always to commercial growers – is taste. Most will accept a slightly lower yield of particularly tasty vegetables than a higher-yielding but bland crop.
Choosing a good cultivar is crucial as it takes as much effort to raise a poor selection as the best. To help gardeners choose the best plants, the RHS conducts trials to identify the top performers for garden (as opposed to commercial) use. Trials are judged by expert vegetable growers, breeders and seed suppliers who use their expertise and experience to select the best for the Award of Garden Merit (AGM). You can download the details of AGM vegetables and suppliers here.
Choosing the best cultivars is particularly important for crops that will occupy ground for months. Brussels sprouts, for example, may take nine months to crop. They can be bought as cheap open-seeded cultivars, but hybrid cultivars produce more and better sprouts, and better disease resistance has been incorporated. Seeds of the best and newest cultivars may be more expensive than other selections, but are usually well worth the extra money.
Growing something different
Some crops are too specialist, new or marginal in UK conditions to test or award AGMs - tomatillos and okra for example. The RHS Members’ Advisory Service does not think there is much difference between the few cultivars on offer, so you can reasonably take ‘pot luck’.
There is of course no reason for adventurous gardeners to be bound by the AGM list. You might want to try cultivars so new they have yet to be assessed – but note that they might not be all that the suppliers claim.
Old-fashioned ‘heritage’ and other long-established selections might interest you. Many are reputed to be better flavoured than modern cultivars, and may be of unusual colouring or more ornamental. In fact, although they may have been introduced many years ago, they have often been well looked after by seed suppliers and benefited from many years of careful selection. For example, though Amsterdam carrots have been cultivated for decades and still hold their own, open-pollinated ‘Amsterdam Forcing 3’ was judged an improvement and received an AGM in 2006.