Every year, horticulture experts around the world cultivate new and exciting plant varieties to enhance the diversity and productivity of gardens everywhere. Not just for show, most new varieties of fruits and vegetables offer improved yields and hardiness, and they thrive right alongside the tried-and-true varieties.
Gardeners always love to grow the newest varieties of their favorite plants, and the ones listed below are sure to be crowd-pleasers. Resulting from years of experience from established companies and garden enthusiasts, each of these unique varieties has something special to add to the garden. Increased disease resistance, more compact growth habits and unusual-colored fruits are all reasons to consider adding one of these new varieties to your garden.
Burpee introduces “world’s largest sauce tomato”
Burpee is known for bringing new vegetable varieties to American gardens for 136 years—including the first white sweet corn, the legendary ‘Big Boy’ tomato, and ‘Sweet Seedless,’ the first ever seedless tomato. For 2013, Burpee has introduced SuperSauce Hybrid Tomato, “the world’s largest sauce tomato.”
SuperSauce is the new superhero of tomatoes. The first ripe fruits tip the scale at up to 2 pounds, measuring a whopping 5.5 inches tall and 5 inches wide. SuperSauce produces gallons of luscious, seedless sauce from a single plant harvest—one tomato fills an entire sauce jar. The easy-to-grow, indeterminate, disease-free plants yield a summer-long supply of exquisitely flavored marinara, tomato gravy or meat sauce. But wait! It gets even better. With its large segments of meaty and delicious flesh, SuperSauce is the only paste tomato that doubles as a sandwich slicer. Try it on a hamburger or tomato sandwich and you won’t believe the taste bonus over a horizontal slice of beefsteak.
Tomatoes are the nations favorite backyard garden fruit because they are easy to grow, are prolific producers and have unrivaled summer flavor. SuperSauce Hybrid Sauce Tomato is already one of Burpee’s best-selling tomato introductions ever. A packet of SuperSauce Tomato seeds sells for $6.50 or 3 garden-ready plants sell for $14.95, exclusively from Burpee, (800) 888-1447 or www.burpee.com.
Grow “Condo Mangos” on a porch or patio
Mangos are prized worldwide for their sweet, delicious fruit. Unfortunately, full-sized mango trees grow too large for small yards and containers. A new variety of mango called ‘Cogshall’ is nicknamed “condo mango” because of its dwarf growth habit and ease of growing in a pot. Known by the botanical name Mangifera indica, the tree matures to about 8 feet tall and will bear a crop of mangos every year once it reaches fruiting age (in 3-4 years). The sweet, fiberless fruit has a yellowish-orange skin with a red blush and ripens in mid-to-late summer. Mangos are self-fertile so a single plant will bear fruit. Allow the fruit to fully ripen on the tree for maximum sweetness. Grow in full sun in well-drained but evenly moist potting soil. This variety is cold hardy to USDA Zone 10, so bring it inside when the nighttime temperatures drop to the low 40s. Available in a 6-inch pot for $39.95 from Logee’s, (888) 330-8038 or www.logees.com.
Rosella Purple Tomato is the perfect container variety
Rosella Purple is a new dwarf tomato variety that produces fruits similar to Cherokee Purple but on short plants, making this variety ideal for container gardening. Bred by the Dwarf Tomato Project, an international group of tomato enthusiasts devoted to breeding short tomato varieties with great flavor, Rosella Purple fruits weigh 6-10 ounces and feature a delightful deep purple color. The productive plants grow to about 36 inches tall and benefit from some staking to keep them upright and to protect the fruits from sunscald. These determinate plants produce fruit 65 days after transplanting.
Rosella Purple originated from a cross between Budai (a small red-fruited dwarf) and Stump of the World, made in 2006 by Patrina Nuske Small in Australia. A subsequent selection discovered by Craig LeHoullier led to Rosella Purple—after other members of the Dwarf Tomato Project (www.dwarftomatoproject.com) made their own contributions. A packet of seeds sells for $3.25 from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, www.southernexposure.com or (540) 894-9480.
