Best Vegetable Varieties to Grow- My 2023 Favorites

Here are my picks for the best vegetable and annual flower varieties to grow, from my 2023 Zone 6a, Ohio gardens.
Be sure to also check out more of my favorites here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4zzslvkscX3tga7YPXDgyTZL3ge5wMI9&si=yqePVfJgef0Qke_S

Tiger’s Eye Shell Bean recipe: https://www.radicalfamilyfarms.com/csa-resource-area/2021/5/2/tigers-eye-beans
Curtido Recipe: https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/salvadoran-cabbage-relish-curtido
My Fermented Hot Sauce Recipe: https://youtu.be/M_YQ0WtMcOY?si=Bnm15BX4gldEzNo0

Some of the links included here are affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you. I will only recommend items I love and should you choose to make a purchase, it helps support the channel! Thank you! 💚

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00:00 Intro
00:30 A few words on selecting favorites, sourcing and regional adaptability
02:26 Broccoli
04:15 Cabbage
05:22 Bunching Onion
06:40 Carrot
07:18 Beet
08:59 Shell Bean
11:22 Snap Bean
14:28 Cucumber
15:55 Hot Pepper
17:54 Winter Squash
21:48 Ground Cherry
23:21 Tomato
30:13 Hyacinth Bean
31:32 Sunflower

#ohiogardening #zone6gardening

Good morning everybody can you believe that it is already 2024 and we are quickly approaching the start of a new gardening season here in the Midwest for those of you who are new to the channel welcome I’m gardening in midwestern Ohio in zone 6A and for those of you who have

Been with me for a while thank you for sticking with me through this couple of months Hiatus I am busily working on getting new gardening content ready for the coming gardening season now before we jump into the favorites I wanted to cover just a few things and these are

The same things that I mentioned in last year’s video the first is that I am a seed trial manager by trade so every season I trial hundreds of varieties some new some old some of them are coming directly from breeding companies and seed companies so not all of these

Are on the market yet for the items where I know of a source I try to list it in the video but if they aren’t for sale yet I do look for them to come to the market very soon keep in mind too that these are my favorites just from

The 2023 gardening season I’ve been triing and keeping track of favorites since about 2012 so if you’re looking for a specific class of vegetable and you don’t see it listed here feel free to drop a line in the comments below and ask me about it

Chances are I have a variety or 10 I can recommend be sure to also check out the favorites from 2022 and 21 videos and I will link those in this video description below and I’m currently working on compiling a complete list that I hope to have up on my website

Relatively soon and one last note for the most part varieties tend to be regionally adapted that means that a tomato that does awesome in Ohio may not perform so well in Southern California we have very different growing conditions different pest pressures different disease pressures and that all

Equates to things doing well in certain areas and not so well in others the 2023 was a challenging growing year here in Ohio with a lot of temperature swings from hot to cold and back again we had drought in the later part of the summer

Into early fall so I don’t have as many varieties that performed exceptionally this year as I have in Prior years but those that did perform well you can bet those are very strong varieties so let’s jump into the favorites kicking off this year with a broccoli and this is purple

Magic High hbd broccoli this is a brand new All-American selections winner and this is the first purple heading purple stemmed broccol this is one because this is a brand new release at the time of filming this video I couldn’t find any seed companies that had this one for

Sale but I do look for it to be out there very very soon purple magic is higher in anthocyanin an antioxidant which gives it its purple color and it has a sweeter flavor than most of your typical green heading broccolis but what really stood out to me with this one

During a terrible growing season was that it was extremely vigorous and seemed to resist stress very very well so we had an early very hot very dry spell and a lot of my comparison broccoli basically just went straight to bolting so they were starting to form a

Head it got hot and they immediately started sending up flower stocks purple magic did not it seemed to tolerate the Heat and those temperature swings really really well it Formed nice nice big heads it didn’t get bitter it didn’t button or bolt so for me growing in an area that has unpredictable spring

Seasons a broccoli like this is a garden Lifesaver now you may have heard me mention one of my other favorite purple broccoli in the past and that is burgundy sprouting broccoli the difference there is the purple magic is a standard heading broccoli so one big head harvested you will get some s

Shoots um but it’s not going to be a prolonged Harvest like the sprouting type will be but in my garden I can definitely see a place for both of them the purple magic for a nice big initial Harvest and then that burgundy sprouting broccoli for an extended Harvest of

Those smaller shoots and florettes next up is slm cabbage I’ve been on the lookout for a full size so around that 8 to 10 lb head size multi-purpose cabbage for a while now my wish list included excellent tolerance to heat and cold and swings between those extremes relatively

Early maturity good performance in both the spring and the fall growing Seasons good holding ability without cracking so it gives me a longer Harvest window a tight core and great flavor basically a great tasting cabbage that’s foolproof to grow I felt like that was reasonable expectation well slm did tick all of

Those boxes for me cabbage is not NE necessarily the most glamorous vegetable in the garden but it is a vegetable that is a standby in my garden so it’s really nice to have a variety that’s easy to grow stress resistant reliably produces nice big heads I did find that the heads

Stored well in Cold Storage they also make an excellent fermented CTO now I love love love bunching onions also known as scallions I find that they’re easier to grow than b onions they tend to be extremely winter hearty and they’re just really versatile in cooking my old standby is a variety called

Guardsman which is still an excellent option but when I saw a new variety called nebon and I’m probably pronouncing that wrong in Johnny’s catalog it sucked me in the claim of a sweeter more complex flavor than standard bunching onions is what really got me and it did deliver on that claim

I found it to be sweeter a little mild milder than some bunching onions and it did have this kind of savory complexity to the flavor now according to Johnny’s this one can be grown as a special style of Japanese leak if you Hill the shanks

I did not do this but you can see that these formed a pretty sizable shank without doing anything extra now these have been in my garden since early spring and it remains to be seen how cold hearty this variety is my Guardsmen I can typically overwinter here with no

Protection I’ll know on this one come about March but you can see it’s got these nice big Greens on here this thing has still been productive up until the beginning of January so I’m really impressed with it another vegetable I am always on the lookout for are carrots

That can tolerate my heavy soil this year’s winner was crunch a bunch carrot and its thicker N Style root Powers down through heavy soil a lot better than something like say an imperator type which tends to be really thin and delicate it reliably produces at least 6

In long deep orange roots and one of the best parts for me was that again in a spring season where it got unseasonably hot and dry and a lot of my other standby carrots really kind of got bitter in the Heat this one stayed nice and sweet and mild and had an

Exceptionally crisp crunch another standby spring root crop are beets and I have a longstanding love affair with beets but they are not always the easiest thing to grow here in Ohio one of the keys to success for me besides healthy soil and proper timing are finding varieties that form nice strong

Deep tap roots and have great stress resistance and such was the case with this new variety unbeatable I found this one quite easy to grow it has relatively early maturity which means I’m getting a harvest before the weather gets really hot and dry great stress resistance

Thanks in part to a nice root system in a nice deep tap rot The Roots can reach a large size without getting Woody so I was regularly harvesting beetroots about this big and they were still nice and tender but you can Harvest this one anytime from baby size on up it has nice

Big strong tops and those beet greens are great for eating too I like to prepare them much in the same way I would prepare charred and the beets themselves have great flavor so really sweet rich and with a minimal amount of earthy flavor and I I do like that

Earthy flavor in a bead I know there’s some people who don’t but for for me that’s what makes a beat a beat now are there sweeter more refined varieties on the market yes and to fill that Niche I highly recommend varieties like Red Cloud or maybe Bohan but unbeatable for

Me really is the best all-around performer so good flavor combined with ease of growth compared with good health and size it just again ticks all those boxes off for a great Garden variety next up a couple of really nice shell beans so I don’t actually eat that many

Beans but I grow them every year in the garden because I am absolutely enamored with all of the shapes and colors and patterns that are available in Shell beans now the first winner this year is a variety called Nightfall and the picture in the catalog got me instantly

It’s a really attractive unique Bean but then the fun story of how it ended up in fruition seeds lineup really sealed the deal for me I love a seed with a good story and it didn’t disappoint it was lovely easy to grow productive I really liked the semi- pull habit so these grew

To about 4 feet so it was easy to Trellis them on my shorter pea fences rather than having to have a great big tall elaborate trellis for them easy to pick and the beans themselves are similar in size and eating quality to your typical black bean so I use these

Much in the same way that I would use a standard black bean the other thing I noticed was it seemed like these were easier to Shell than some of my other shell Bean varieties now the second variety is one that I’ve actually grown off and on in my garden for about a

Decade now I just keep coming back to it because it’s such a good bean and this is tiger’s eye shell bean and this one is a big meaty Bean with a really nice rich flavor and this one I use in a manner similar to how I would use pinto

Beans so for a really good basic and versa atile recipe I’ve linked a recipe from radical Family Farms for tigers’s ey beans in the video description below the other nice thing is it does have really tender skins a lot of seed companies say the Skins disappear upon

Cooking I don’t know if that’s entirely accurate but they are really thin and delicate and you don’t even really notice them when you’re eating them now this one is a bush shell Bean so more of about that two 2 and 1/2t size it does have a tendency to throw some some Vines

So typically when you have your plot in the garden you’ll notice several plants will send up vines or chots that are several feet higher not a big deal you can either plant this variety along a short support or just let those Vines kind of sprawl and intermix with the

Other plants very very productive reliably produces big beans just a really nice variety overall next on to green or snap beans now green beans are relatively easy to grow here in Ohio and it takes quite a bit anymore to get me excited about a new green bean variety

But this one did it this one is Blue Lake Superior and you may be familiar with Blue Lake beans but you may not realize that Blue Lake is a class of beans not an actual variety so the one that most people are familiar with the one I see offered in seed cataloges a

Lot is Blue Lake 274 that’s an old old variety but the Blue Lake class is typically Ally going to have most remarkably that flavor so what most people kind of describe as that good old-fashioned green bean flavor they’re known for that they also tend to have longer thinner pods they

Are stringless productive overall reliable performance in the home Garden well this new Blue Lake Superior keeps on those family traditions especially flavor it has a great flavor cooked fresh frozen or canned but some of the improvements include a more upright plant structure so your plants aren’t

Going to get all floppy um they stand up better they stand up better after you’ve gone through and picked them I don’t know if any of you have had this experience but I find that a lot of times I’ll go in and do my first thorough picking and I come back and all

My bean plants are like they’re still productive but they kind of look like crud and they’re harder to pick for the next picking this one has a more upright structure so the plants stay upright easier picking keeps the pods off the ground the pods are also more uniform

And straight again nice for picking also nice if you do something like a can Dilly Bean where it’s easier if all those pods are kind of the same size and shape it’s got better disease resistance than the older varieties so overall you’re going to see healthier plants in

Your garden and the thing that blew me away was the production Blue Lake Superior more than doubled production on my comparison varieties this year and most be beans in general are pretty productive to start with so I had a lot of green beans the other thing that I

Noticed with that production was it tended to come in waves so I would have a huge picking strip all those beans get them cleaned off and almost reliably like two weeks later I’d have another huge picking rather than the beans kind of putting on a handful here and a

Handful there and this was really nice for processing so if I just wanted to get a bunch of beans and I wanted to get them all canned or frozen I could go out and pick and do a huge batch rather than having to pick save them in the

Refrigerator pick some more um not an issue for those of you who are planting like Acres of beans but if you’re only doing a relatively small planting this is a really nice trait this is one that I’m going to be growing in my own garden from here on out it surpassed my old

Favorite which was Derby and next year I’m already looking forward to doing a larger planting of this Blue Lake Superior variety next up cucumber but this is not just any run-of-the-mill Garden variety cucumber I actually consider this one a bit of a frivolous treat on my part but it was so fun to

Grow quick snack cucumber is in a line of what I would consider micro dwarf vegetable plants the line being called kitchen Minis and the idea with these is that they can be grown in small pots so for this one they recommend a 6 to 8 in

Size pot either on a window sill or like I did under grow lights I’ve grown other veggies in this kitchen mini series I’ve had great success with a lot of their tomatoes and their Peppers the Cucumber did not disappoint now I like to grow these microor veggies indoors in the

Winter and I do mine under grow lights because I just don’t get enough reliable sunlight through my windows in the winter time but they do really really well under grow lights a quick snack is a parthenocarpic variety so it does not require pollination to set fruit and it

Sets little what they call Cocktail sized cucumbers so I was picking at about 4 in and they are sweet tender and crisp with a very very thin skin my kids loved these in fact my biggest issue with the quick snack cucumber was that my kids were fighting over who got the

Last cucumber because as you can imagine I was not getting a ton of production off of these things but again a lot of fun to grow now what would the garden favorites be without at least one hot pepper this is another group of veggies where I probably only really need one

Plant ever of hot peppers but I love them so much that I go overboard every year now this year’s big winner is a variety called AI de Colorado alpino and it is actually a botum type I love badams because they have this really distinctive fruity sometimes almost floral undertone underneath that heat

That they have and it makes for a really interesting eating experience the problem with traditional botoms is they are native to South America and a lot of them don’t like cooler soil temperatures and they’re a very very long season maturity so sometimes they don’t want to mature early enough for me to get

Peppers here in Ohio now a Colorado solves that problem it’s a land Ras variety from Colorado so it’s much more tolerant to cool soils it’s a very early maturity and the plants stay relatively compact some botoms can just get enormous and this stayed at kind of a

Nice about a 4T size but what I really loved was the flavor True to botoms this one had that nice fruity undertone underneath a pretty good spice level so I would categorize it somewhere between a jalapeno and a Cayenne keep in mind though that hot peppers will develop

More heat in stressed conditions so if you have really nice soil plenty of water your hot peppers won’t tend to be as hot so this one definitely has the potential to get hotter it’s also a really pretty Pepper with a nice color change happening as it reaches different

Levels of maturity now wild mountain seeds say on their website that this was a favorite of theirs for Pico Deo and also a key ingredient in producing an amazing hot pepper ferment and I agree this is one of the best peppers I have ever tried in my fermented hot sauce

Recipe definitely a winner and next up is winter squash and I swore I was not going to add any more winter squash to my trial list this year I already had I think 13 varieties when a friend raved to me about tetu Kabota winter squash I

Was still going to skip it till I went on the website and so that it supposedly had squash fine bore resistance and I had to try it now tetsu Kabota is unique in that it is a caboa Butternut cross and it actually requires pollination from another squash to set fruit so

Johnny’s recommends caboa Butternut Buttercup or hubard squash this wasn’t an issue for me because I was already planning on growing butternut squash but it could be if you only have room for one squash in your garden now the first thing that I noticed about this variety is the vines

Are absolutely rampant it was growing all over my squash patch it was growing into the lawn it was growing up into a tree it was everywhere but what’s nice about these rampant Vines is that this squash does what some other squash like butternuts will do and that is it will

Root kind of wherever those Vines touch bare ground this helps impart some of that squash Vine bore resistance because even if a bore gets your main stem you have plenty of other points where this plant is rooted into the ground the other thing that helps with the squash

Vine bores is that this type has a very very hard stem that it’s difficult for them to burrow into now along with those big rampant vines with plenty of production so this thing again produced more squash than my family will probably eat this winter but it also supposedly

Has a really long storage life so we can keep these for a long time the next thing that I noticed with this was that really dark green almost black rind color it’s really really unique easy to spot um in the garden so easy to pick

And that rind is rock hard and the other remarkable trait was that by the end of the growing season when most winter squash and pumpkins in my area are just decimated by Pest and diseases these Vines still looked relatively healthy so I got a nice big Harvest and even though

I knew better I just wanted to try one of these so bad I cut it up pretty quickly after harvest and baked it this is a type that you should actually cure for at least 6 weeks before eating because it will develop better sugars better flavor through that curing

Process and then on into storage I knew that but I really wanted to try it so I baked one up it was okay it wasn’t great but then I tried a couple more near things giving and Christmas and they were much improved so tasting SL baking

Notes what I noticed with this one very very dense relatively dry flesh so not dry in an unpleasant way but dry in that a lot of times with pumpkins and winter squash I actually have to strain them before I use them for something like pie because they have a lot of liquid this

One I did not have to strain at all um before using it in a pumpkin pie a little bit lower sugar now my friend who grew this last year and this year said last year’s batch was sweeter for some reason some of that could be weather

Driven but I didn’t find it to be the sweetest of the squash that I’ve ever tried but definitely a really nice rich flavor the texture was very very smooth so no strings at all and what’s nice about this kind of flavor profile is it lends itself equally well to Savory

Dishes as to sweet now it remains to be seen the storage life on these I’ve read really encouraging reports that these will last well into the next spring after harvest I’m guessing because of that how hard and dense that rind is they should store pretty well but time

Will tell if they do store as well as the claims say they will then this probably will be a regular in my rotation definitely impressive in all of its other traits next we have a ground cherry now I find ground cherries of all types to be delightful to grow there’s

Something about popping those little golden orbs out of the papery husk that is just really fun and satisfying and honestly pretty much all of the ground cherry varieties I’ve grown which include ones like Aunt Molly’s and pineapple have been really really nice great flavor this year I grew a variety

Called kex pineapple and what I noticed with this one is it was probably the most productive of any ground cherry that I’ve ever grown and that’s saying a lot because most ground cherries are extremely productive as is from two tiny little seedlings and and I do mean tiny

Every year I forget and I start my ground cherries at the same time as I start my tomatoes and tomatillos and really they would be better off being started about a month early they’re really really slow to get started but once I got them out into the garden and

The heat set in they really took off to the point where those two tiny seedlings almost took over my entire 12T raised bed like most ground cherries coex pineapple Apple had a really bright fruity almost tropical flavor and I would definitely say that these lend themselves more to Sweet applications so

Think jams or preserves or even I saw a recipe for ground cherry crisp which I thought sounded good versus a more Savory application like a salsa or a salad but a really fun really productive variety it’ll be a sad year the year that I don’t have a tomato favorite from

The garden this year I had one favorite and then a couple of Runners up the favorite is a variety called raspberry drops and this one is the best flavored grape tomato that I have ever grown raspberry drops is part of the cream of the crop tomato program which is a joint

Effort between AP wh seeds and frogs leap farm and honestly the entire cream of the crop collection is worth checking out there are just such amazing unique delicious tomatoes in that lineup um Sparky tropical Sunset red torch just a few of my other favorites from that program but I digress raspberry drops a

Beautiful deep raspberry pink grape tomato for me the primary fruit got quite large so closer to like small plum size as the season progressed as is normal the fruit got a little smaller to where I ended up toward the end of the season with what I would consider a

Large grape they’re very very sweet very meaty a good little hit of acid there at the end just an excellent overall flavor and eating quality they’re also very very good roasted now I first saw this Variety in trials in Wisconsin and even amongst many other fantastically flavored Tomatoes This one stood out so

I’ve always wanted this in my own garden at home um General plant Health they’re they’re big vigorous indeterminate Vines so my plants grew to about 8 feet tall very very productive productive right up until the frost and good disease resistance even in my high pressure area

Of Ohio I’m also going to mention three runners up in the Tomato category now I’m mentioning these because they were really really good and had some really promising attributes they’re just not my favorites of all time but from the 23 Garden they were top performers the

First is Buffalo Sun tomato and this is the second year that I’ve grown Buffalo sun in my garden now this is a big meaty yellow with red splashes kind of beef steak style tomato very reminiscent in appearance to heirlooms like pineapple or striped German but unlike those heirlooms Buffalo sun has vastly

Improved resistance to cracking much higher productivity and better disease resistance so specifically um for my area it’s got resistance to late blight which is a big deal so Buffalo Sun had a very sweet sweet rich flavor a little lower on the acidity so for someone who

Can’t tolerate a lot of acid in their Tomatoes it might be a good choice I like a little more acid but I still found this one to have a really nice flavor it also steers very clear of having any kind of a mushy or mealy texture which for me is an absolute no

In a tomato now like I said this was a favorite in my 20123 garden but I just have to throw out there for a big non red beef steak type tomato still my all-time favorite is a variety called orange Jazz so check that one out too

Next up is a variety called coyote and coyote is unique for a couple of different reasons the first is that it is a different species than your typical standard Garden tomato it’s a Pimpin P I can’t say the word I’m just going to put it up here on the screen it’s a

Current tomato so great big rangy wild habit B teeny tiny tomatoes the other is that it grows wild in Mexico and has a lot of what I assume is natural disease resistance what actually sucked me into growing this one was its claims of late and early blight resistance and septoria

Leaf spot resistance and I was not disappointed this is probably the healthiest tomato plant I’ve ever grown um even late in the season so in October right before that Frost when my tomatoes usually are just kind kind of crispy and brown this plant still looked remarkably healthy like other current tomato types

Very very vigorous plants I probably could have had this one on a 12ft trellis it way overgrew the panel I was using incredibly productive one plant more Tomatoes than my family could ever dream of eating and I mean it is small smaller than a typical cherry tomato but

Bigger than some of the other current varieties I’ve grown coyote had really pretty creamy kind of pale yellow fruit and the fruit is very very sweet but this one was not a flavor favorite for me I tend to like quite acidic tomatoes and coyote really had virtually no acid

Again this could be really good for folks who can’t tolerate acidic tomatoes but very very sweet um I saw somewhere they describ this as having almost vanilla undertones and I can get that it was definitely a unique flavor but even though it wasn’t my personal flavor

Favorite I feel like I just can’t knock it for its other positive attributes I mean if you want a healthy productive almost no fail tomato for your garden this is definitely one to look at and the final runner up was perfection in pink I am a sucker for

Indigo tomatoes or tomatoes that have anthocyan and in them that gives them kind of this deep purpley black blush Perfection and pink is kind of kind of a raspberry pink cherry tomato with this really beautiful blue black Splash wherever it’s exposed to sunlight so you get some fruit that are totally shaded

That stay entirely pink I think indigo tomatoes are just gorgeous and when I was looking back at my camera roll from this past season and realized I had probably three times the amount of photos of perfection and pink as compared to any other tomato I think that really attests to my my attraction

To this type now I’ve grown a lot of indigo type cherries in the past and really they’ve all done relatively well nothing has ever surpassed my all-time favorite which is midnight snack but perfection in pink was really nice this year the plants weren’t quite as disease

Resistant as coyote but still at the end of the season it looked impressively healthy the fruit have a really nice balanced sweet Savory flavor and it seems very resistant to cracking which for a cherry tomato is really important because I’ve had so many where I go out

And pick a whole boatload of cherry tomatoes bring them in and by the time they’re sitting in the kitchen for 2 minutes they’ve all split open and this one doesn’t do that it tends to hold really really well and to wrap it up a few ornamental plants now the first was

Ruby Moon hin bean and I’ve had this on my wish list for years I have no idea why it took me so long to grow this one I I wish it hadn’t because this plant was gorgeous the looks alone are enough to earn it a spot in my garden every

Year but as a bonus extremely easy to grow it just seemed to laugh at our hot humid summer um the drought later in the season didn’t even seem to phase it and it gave me color all season long so from the purplish tinted foliage to those gorgeous fuchsia blooms to the

Decorative purple pods toward the end of the season just beautiful all around now hin beans technically is edible from what I’ve read you have to be really careful with it you should soak them and then most sources recommend boiling them twice to get rid of some of the toxic compounds

That are in the beans if you’re careful to prep them properly you can eat them um the flowers and the foliage are both also edible I however did not eat any part of the plants I was happy to have it out there for the pollinators the bees and other pollinating insects seem

To really enjoy the flowers and just for me to enjoy the color through the season and finally Rouge Royale sunflower so I have a ton of volunteer sunflowers every year but I wanted to kind of shake things up so in amongst all of the gold sunflowers I planted some of these Rouge

Royale now I first scw this one in trial years ago as a comparison against other dark red colored varieties and this one looks in real life the way that the old overly saturated overly photoshopped pictures of a variety called velvet Queen used to looking cataloges I don’t

Know if anyone remembers this but years ago velvet Queen was one of the only dark red varieties and I feel like every catalog had a picture of it looking like this deep rich maroon burgundy red color wine color and in reality it actually looks like this so it had been years

Since I’d seen this one in person in my own garden and it did not disappoint my inner 9s goth teenager was absolutely delighted with these deep moody in certain lights almost black blooms my only regret this year was not planting these on mass for a really dramatic

Effect I will definitely be finding a spot to do that this year so that wraps up my favorites from the 2023 gardening season and I’d love to hear from you as well if you have a favorite or favorites that you grew last year and think I

Should try in my garden drop a line in the comments below and let me know and if you enjoyed today’s video please consider subscribing to my Channel growfully with Jenna thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time