24 Rare Seeds I'm Growing in 2020!

Well, I said I wouldn't do it this year, but I did it anyways. And I bought, I bought a ton of seeds from one of my favorite seed companies, Baker Creek. So I figured what I would do is run through, like I did last year, 23, 24 of the varieties of rare seeds that I'm growing this year. So we're going to rapid fire through. I've got my kombucha here. I've got my seeds. I'm good to go. So let's go ahead and talk about these. And the first one we're talking about is Marketmore 76 Cucumber. It's actually probably the most ordinary looking seed in this entire big old honking pile of seeds, but it's a vigorous producer. The thing that's nice about Marketmore 76 is it's an open pollinated version of one that was developed at Cornell. So it's a true heirloom, uh, but it's very, very productive. It has a beautiful flavor and it also holds up. So let's say you're a market farmer or something like that. Marketmore 76 would be a really good one. Hence the name. About eight or nine inches, uniform, beautiful. So we're going to be doing some Marketmore on some trellises this year. Stay tuned for a video on that. Next we have one of my favorite types of peas, Desiree Dorf Blauschacker. The pea pods are maybe like two, two and a half inches long. Beautiful purple color and they are very juicy and vibrantly purple on the inside too. Like your teeth will get colored purple. So these are a fantastic spring crop. Highly recommend them. They're my favorite pea that I've ever grown. So I'm going to go ahead and do it again this year. Speaking of favorite things that I've ever grown, Dragon's Tongue Bush Beans are one of them. It's one of my favorite beans. It cooks down and eventually tastes pretty much like a green bean, almost a bit meatier because you can see the bean, the beans themselves are a little bit wider, but it's just very productive. I don't have many problems with it. Again, it's a bush bean so it's not going to vine up. It's not going to need a trellis and it just produces like crazy. I mean, I don't have any problems with them at all. Just direct sow them. It'll do better, at least in my experience, if you have a bit of a warmer summer than average. If you have a kind of a mild summer, maybe go with pole beans instead. Bush beans seem to do a little better in the heat, but that's just my own experience. The flavor is just really, really tasty. It's really good for kids too. I think kids like to grow things that are colorful, that are exciting and a dragon's tongue bean definitely fits the bill. Next, in my quest to grow more flowers this year, we have the amazing gray poppy. I mean, accurately named. I don't know that I've ever seen one that looks quite like this. Granted, I haven't grown a ton of flowers in my gardening career, but it's something I'm doing a lot more. I want to add more beauty to the garden and I want to add just a more diverse ecosystem for the many pollinators that will run through the garden. And honestly, I might even grow these as a cut flower. Apparently that they're pretty prized for florists. So who knows? I might create some arrangements. But edible gray, amazing gray poppy is on the list this year. So I grew corn in raised beds last year. I grew a more classic corn, I think Silver Queen. This one is Astronomy Domine. It's a 65 to 70 day variety. So it's a pretty early season variety and it's a sweet corn. A lot of the corn that's multicolored like this, like for example, glass gem corn, that classic one, is, is not a sweet corn. You're not going to eat it fresh. Whereas you can with this. It's apparently pretty nutrient dense and it just looks amazing. It doesn't quite have that vibrancy of color that the glass gem corn has, but it still looks really cool and I can eat it fresh, which is how I like to eat my corn personally. Okay, this corn immediately intrigued me as soon as I saw it. Japanese black sticky corn. I mean, if you look at it, it doesn't really look like any corn that I've ever seen. And apparently there's a lot of debate on like how this corn developed and exactly where it originated. But it's often harvested immature. You can use it for mochi. It has a stickiness to it, hence the name. And you can harvest it immature, like I said, and eat, eat it fresh or you can steam it. And so I'm really excited about this. I'm not quite sure how this will perform in my area. But again, part of the fun of gardening for me is growing some unique things. We'll see how this one does. Japanese black sticky corn. Our final corn on the list, I'm going to have to have a lot more space if I'm growing all this guys, is Montana lavender clay corn. It's a flower corn. And as the name suggests, it has that beautiful lavender color. We'll see how this one goes. It says it'll do really well in a rugged sort of cold climate. Uniform ears. This is probably my third pick as far as the ones that I will sacrifice as far as space goes. So if I don't have enough space, this one might not make the planting list this year or I may just plant it on a separate property, one of my friend's gardens that I helped manage out. But Montana lavender, really interesting. I just couldn't say no. So it made it into my shopping cart. So here's one where I just bought it simply because the seed packet looks amazing. But I mean, mint is one of my favorite things to grow. It's one of the easiest plants to grow provided you give it what it needs. And this is mountain mint. It's generally a perennial. It's a great pollinator plant that you can also use as the photo implies for tea, mint tea. So I'm going to grow it. It's going to be a unique mint that I've never grown before and I'm really excited about it. Speaking of another amazing pollinator plant that you can also use in the kitchen in your drinks is Paradiso Mix Echinacea. I mean, the color differentiation on this is incredible. It's a fantastic pollinator plant and it fits with my goal of growing more flowers this year. So of course this one made the shopping cart. Now here's one that I actually do have some history with. The five colored pepper was one of the first peppers I ever bought from Baker Creek back in the day and I kind of set it and forget it and had an amazing five colored pepper plant. It was absolutely beautiful. It's just one of the most fun peppers. It says ornamental. I mean, you can technically eat it. It's just the flavor is just more raw heat and not a lot of subtlety. So most people don't. But you get this beautiful ripening pattern of purple all the way towards a cream, which is why it's called the five colored pepper. And they don't ripen uniformly. So you get a Willy Wonka type of pepper look, which is really, really neat. So if you're interested in that, definitely toss this one in the cart. So now we have solar flare lettuce, which was apparently developed from a 1600 variety of lettuce called spotted Aleppo. So it's very storied, very storied history on this one. You can tell the color is beautiful. I just wanted a really beautiful, showy sort of leaf lettuce that was red and this one fit the bill. So spotted flare is going in the garden this year. This is one of the weirdest things I'm growing this year. I've grown peanuts before and not had a ton of success in my garden. So I figured why not grow an even more finicky peanut? See how that goes. This is Fostegata pinstripe. So it's a striped peanut. You can see and native to Ecuador, I believe, purple stripes. It wants to, of course it's a peanut, so it wants loose soil. Peanuts are going to be developing underneath and it wants hot temperatures. So I'm going to plant it in the best area I possibly have in my garden and we'll see how that goes this year. Our next plant is another leafy green. It's Lunix lettuce. You can see it's a, it's an oak leaf style red that it just, it just does really well. It doesn't bolt that quickly, which means that for me, I can garden mostly year round, which means that as soon as like November through maybe February, that's lettuce season for me. And as I go into spring summer, I kind of really can't grow it cause it's a little too hot. So I wanted to see if I could do it with something that was a little bit slower to bolt and it seems like Lunix lettuce might fit the bill. So here is another pepper that is somewhat similar to the Chinese five color. It's still an ornamental. It's screaming hot and not a lot of subtlety in the flavor. So you don't typically eat it. It's the Phileas blue. And it's going to be very compact, great ornamental, like I said. And again, it does go through a bit of a color change during its ripening phase. So you get this sort of Willy Wonka style and it's just another good option for an ornamental pepper if you want a pop of color and to plant something that's technically edible, but really more serves a visual function in the garden. Okay, so I'm a little behind the curve on this one, but I decided to bite the bullet and actually plant some Mexican sour gherkins or cucamelons as they're called. I feel like this was the most popular edible plant of 2018 perhaps. Everyone was growing these guys. Uh, we'll see how they go. I usually don't devote a lot of space towards things that vine like crazy and actually block a lot of the sun in my garden, but I have some new things going on in the front yard this year. So we'll see how this one does. Here is a plant that really I question why I even buy these seeds because they're so abundant in my natural landscape. If I go into the canyon, I can see nasturtiums everywhere, but I can't see bloody Mary nasturtiums. The interesting thing that's going on in nasturtiums right now is there's a lot of breeding going on to change the color of the flowers. So as you can see here, the flowers look absolutely gorgeous and that's one of my favorite parts of nasturtium because although they are an edible plant and actually prized among chefs, I don't like the taste. They taste sort of soapy to me and I don't know why. Maybe it's like a genetic thing because everyone else seems to love them, but I don't really like the taste. So I'm going to grow them for just the flowers. I just want to see the flowers. Okay, let's get into some big boy tomatoes. This is a very classic, classic tomato, Costaludo genovese. It's been around since the early 19th century and it really just is your classic, beautiful red tomato. So we're just going with a classic, nothing flashy. Uh, this might be the producer this year. Now, of course, if we have something basic, we have to have something a little more flashy. Ananas Noir is the first tomato I ever grew, uh, in 2010. It's the first one. And as you can see, it sort of has this sort of striped, uh, red and yellow patterning. And when you cut it open, that's preserved. So you actually see a bit of that color variegation in there too. This is really, really cool. Big fat tomatoes. I remember just, it's so, it's so massive. It's like one and a half pounds. Uh, and I grew them the first time. So I have a special place in my heart for the Ananas Noir tomato. Thus it's coming back on the menu in 2020. Next we have a carrot. I can't really collect enough carrots, radishes, any root crop. I want as many varieties as possible for some reason. So the Uzbek carrot, you can see it has sort of a broadness throughout. It's almost like just a cylinder instead of tapering off like some of the classic carrots. And so it can do well in a lot of different types of soil. It's not as finicky, I would say, as other carrots are, but it still is a carrot. It still is a carrot. You got to give it the care that it needs. So we'll see how these go this year, the Uzbek golden carrot. Next we have Nero di Toscana kale. Pretty classic variety. It's just one of your, your all around producers. Nothing too fancy here, but it's been around since at least the 1820s. So it's a really old variety. Next a flower that grows really well in my area. It's really easy to grow is a Zinnia. And so I've grown maybe three or four different varieties of Zinnias in my lifetime. But this one certainly looks the most interesting with the variegation and the color variation on the leaves. Just looks like, I don't know, it looks like Jackson Pollock just like splashed some paint on it. So we'll see how these go. Really excited. Candy cane mix Zinnia. So here's a kale that I really hadn't seen before. It really caught my eye. It's called dazzling blue. And as the name suggests, it has this sort of metallic blue sort of vibe to it that speaks to the cold hardiness of this particular kale. Kale in general is very cold hardy, but this one apparently is even more cold hardy. So it's a Lacinato style. Really excited to grow this one. The leaves look like they might be really nice if picked really young while they're nice and tender and nice and sweet and added to a salad. So we'll see how that goes. So here's an interesting jalapeno. It is a jalapeno. It's the Diaghito jalapeno. And the things you'll notice about this guy is that they're very etched. They have a lot of wrinkles and they also have a different bit of a shape. So it's more of a heart shaped structure to it. You can stuff them, right? So kind of like stuffing any other pepper, but you can do like mini stuff these jalapenos. So we'll see how these go. Apparently the flavor is nice and sweet. A perfect compliment to its heat, it says. So I'm excited about these guys. I always love growing new varieties of peppers and this one's new to me, the Diaghito jalapeno pepper. So the fish pepper has a really wild story that I can't really get into in this video cause it's kind of long, but I highly recommend you go look it up. It's actually on the Baker Creek website. It's very fascinating. But this is a pre-1947 African American heirloom that's native to like the Philly, Baltimore region. Not native, but it's, it's where it was most popular. So it's used in fish and shellfish cooking, which is why it's called the fish pepper. But look, I mean, it's just got some really unique striations. They go through some interesting color changes. I'm excited to grow this guy and I've just never done it. So we'll see how this one goes. Actually, you know what the interesting thing is? The foliage is also variegated, which makes it a very exciting ornamental pepper that also is a very good culinary pepper. Our last one is the orange jazz tomato. Great name. It is of course orange with these little white striations throughout. Beefsteak tomato, it's a very heavy producer even as a beefsteak. So you're going to need to beefsteak it up and make sure that you support this bad boy because it can just fall over under its own weight. But it's a tomato, you know, we all know how to steak tomatoes. This is the last one on the list guys. So anything that stood out to you, anything that you're also growing or anything that you think I may have missed this year, comment it down below. I know last year I didn't do the best job of following up on the 2019 things that I grew. Like I grew pink celery that did really well. I grew Job's tears that did really well, but I didn't do as many videos on that. So this year I will do more videos updating on the process of some of the stuff that I'm growing. But the garden's undergoing a little bit of a remodel right now. So the garden's on pause while we rebuild a fence, we rebuild a pathway and we redo all the drip irrigation in the Epic front yard. So I'll take you along for that journey. But all of these right here will be going in at some point in time. So stay tuned for that. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.