planty wishlist! (version 0.2)

[thanate]

I firmly believe that at least 90% of non-pictoral gardening blog posts are pretty boring to just about anybody who hasn't seen the garden in question, and many of those who have. (This is not to say that I don't often read the ones that come across my friends' list...) However, this is not your standard daylilies and azaleas post, nor even one talking about plants for birds & beasts, the names of which you've never heard before.

Last night I started reading Carol Deppe's Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's and Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving, which I got out of the library because they don't yet have her new book, which thewronghands recommended a while back, and I was reading funny bits out to grauwulf by the end of the introduction, and taking notes on the back of my bookmark before I got to chapter 4... On the whole, while the genetics & seed saving stuff is fascinating, the part that really has me reconsidering tearing up bits of the front lawn for more garden beds is the descriptions of all the interesting foods (and I've always been a sucker for reading about interesting food...) that you can grow, if only you can find them.

So, looking up a couple of places that she recommends for getting seeds (because I got impatient & started searching the internet for things I could get my hands on) here's the starter list of stuff I'm contemplating. It seems I have a predilection for purple foods:

From Seeds of Change:

*Bull's Blood Beets, the only beet I've seen so far that's intended more for "greens" and less for beets, as I don't care for the latter
*touchstone gold beet, since who knows, I might like a yellow one
*black chick peas (the only one I've found yet... reportedly Ms Deppe has grown many sorts of tiny chick peas suitable for corn-style popping-- if I'd read the book a few months ago, I could have asked kittymaru to keep an eye out for some while she was in Turkey, bother!)
*Uchiki Kuri, bright red-orange winter squash
*Hokkaido Stella Blue, dusky blue winter squash
*Small Sugar (pumpkin), small reputedly tasty pumpkin
*Purple de Milpa, purple tomatillo-- ok, I hate tomatoes except in sauces, but I've also been thinking of trying to grow one or two & make sauce, and, um, this is purple! What's not to love?
*Purple Beauty Bell Pepper... says it right there
*Tangerine Pimiento Pepper, small and orange, looks interesting...
*Pimiento-L Pepper, heart shaped peppers (in the traditional red)

Seed Saver's Exchange:

*Birdhouse gourds! (ok, not a food, but might make a nice divider between squashes)
*Burpee's Golden beet (dual use, ditto on the might be nicer than nasty mainstream red ones)
***Blue Jade Corn, container sized! blue! sweet corn! yay!
*Smoke Signals, multicolored popping corn looks kind of exciting
*Oaxacan Green Dent, which is a flour corn, which is kind of cool but wouldn't be my sort of thing except that it's rated for having squash & beans grow up it, which is awesome.

...and I haven't even started looking at lettuce/spinach or exciting peas or carrots yet. And there must be something worthy going on locally somewhere...

ETA: dragon carrots, hee! Also, if anyone semi-local would like to split an order of purple or red/pink potatoes, they only seem to come in a 2.5 lb minimum per sort, which is a bit more than I've got space for.

Experimentally cross-posty from dreamwidth. Comments encouraged in either location.