Top Vegetable Varieties for Home Gardens with Niki Jabbour

We continue our cross-Canada tour, chatting with inspiring gardeners to find out favourite varieties and top crops.

Today we chat with Niki Jabbour, a CBC radio gardening expert, one of the creators behind the gardening website savvygardening.com, and the award-winning author of The Year Round Vegetable Gardener, Groundbreaking Food Gardens: 73 Plans That Will Change the Way You Grow Your Garden, Veggie Garden Remix: 224 New Plants to Shake Up Your Garden and Add Variety, Flavor, and Fun, and Growing Under Cover: Techniques for a More Productive, Weather-Resistant, Pest-Free Vegetable Garden.

Niki shares some of her long-time favourite veg varieties, more recent additions to her favourites list, and some varieties with a Canadian pedigree. (Spoiler alert: including one that’s listed in the Slow Fook Ark of Taste.) 

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Lavender got Smoked by Cold? Plant Choices for the Prairies with Dave Hanson

We continue our cross-Canada tour of inspiring gardeners to find out favourite varieties and top crops.

Today we chat with Dave Hanson, co-host of The Grow Guide podcast, and owner of Sage Garden Greenhouses in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Dave shares some of his favourite veg varieties. He also talks about top herbs, one of his specialties.

Lavender get smoked in a harsh winter? Dave has a suggestion. And if you just can’t get enough cucs, hear what he does.

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A Tomato that Sets Fruit When its Cold? Vegetable Varieties for a Cool Climate, with Linda Gilkeson

Leafy greens always seem to bolt too quickly? Can’t figure out why your broccoli isn’t forming heads? Choosing vegetable varieties suited to your climate helps avoid these sorts of frustrations.

In this episode, we get variety recommendations from gardening expert and entomologist Linda Gilkeson. Having spent much of her career on programs to reduce pesticide use, Linda is also an avid organic gardener who can garden year-round in her coastal climate.

Her books include Backyard Bounty: The Complete Guide to Year-Round Organic Gardening in the Pacific Northwest and West Coast Gardening: Natural Insect, Weed and Disease Control.

Linda gardens on Salt Spring Island, one of the Gulf Islands off the coast of British Columbia. She describes her growing conditions as coastal Pacific Northwest. Her variety recommendations are for these conditions.

But even if you’re not in the Pacific Northwest, I suggest you tune in. You’ll hear about tomato varieties that produce when it’s too cold for most others to set fruit. Did you know there are three broad groups of broccoli? And get Linda’s vegetable gardening words of wisdom.

Find Linda online at lindagilkeson.ca

Linda’s Variety List

Long-time favs

• Onions: Red Tropeana Lunga, Sturon onion, Redwing F1, Ambition shallot, Ed’s Red shallot

• Leeks: Unique

• Squash: Robin’s Koginut Squash RKS, Lungo Bianco zucchini, Early golden (yellow) crooknecks

• Peas: Super Sugar Snap

• Roots: Berlicummer carrots, Detroit beets (Det Dk Red, Det Supreme—reselections)

• Greens: Fordhook Swiss chard, Bloomsdale spinach (Long Standing or Savoy), Perpetual/Leafbeet, Lucullus (hardiest)

• Winter Lettuce: Arctic King, Winter Density, Rouge d ’Hiver, Continuity, German butter lettuce

• Summer lettuce: Angry Sea, Jericho, Red sails

• Chinese cabbage: Joi choi, China Express

• Cabbage: Greyhound (sweetheart type), January King, Copenhagen or Danish Ballhead

• Tomato: Early Girl

• Pepper: Gypsy, Carmen

• Cucumbers: Straight 8, Slice More, Marketmore

• Corn: Kandy King, Peaches and Cream

• Beans: Musica Romano pole, Borlotti pole beans

• Broccoli: Green sprouting Calabria, Red Spear PSB (winter)

Recent Favourites

• Grundy Perfect Arrow peas, Dalvey peas

• Dunja F1 zucchini

• Purple Moon cauliflower

• Deadon cabbage

• Kalibos cabbage red

• Badger Flame beets (better than any other golden beets I have eaten)

• Lodi squash (OP very similar to RKS)

• Aspabroc

• Summer Dance cucumber

• Charlotte strawberries

• Suyo cucumber

• Brilliant celeriac

• Jester lettuce

• Tango celery

Sadly Missed Varieties - no longer available

• Partenon zucchini

• Ambercup squash

• Yellow Crooknecks with a long neck

• Straight Arrow Peas

• Narina bush beans

Varieties Suited to the Coastal Pacific Northwest

• Hardy leafy greens: Mizuna, Namenia, Komatsuna, Osaka purple mustard

• Summer broccoli: Green sprouting Calabria

• Winter broccoli (various PSBs)and winter cauliflower (Galleon, Purple Cape)

• Musica romano beans

• Onions on the above list (many onions don’t)

• Carrots, beets, lettuce

Varieties Linda has Only Because of Seed Saving

• Unique leeks

• Musica romano beans

• German butter lettuce

• Namenia

• Red Spear purple spr. broccoli

• Sturon onion