Page 9 - Simply Vegetables Winter 2024/25

New things for 2025
EMILY HARRIS FNVS
Compared to the last time I wrote an article, when it was my favourite time
of the year, I’m writing this at one of my least favourite times – the nights are drawing in rapidly, the weather is grey and miserable, and as it’s only the end of October, so no one even has their Christmas lights up to make up for it! Although I suppose by the time you are reading this, Christmas will be long over for another year – how time flies!
Most of the crops from 2024 have
now finished. We have a few chillies still ripening, a solitary tomato that I’ve left on the plant to see if we get enough sun over the next couple of weeks to fully ripen it, and a Tasty King cucumber plant clinging on with a less than groundbreaking specimen growing – but it’s outlived the Carmen, Socrates and Topline plants which gave up at the first sign of colder weather – so I shouldn’t complain!
Therefore, garden jobs have turned to clearing up and putting everything away for the winter until it’s time to start all over again next year.
That being said, we’ve started thinking about some of the new varieties we are looking to try in 2025, so we thought
we’d share those with you. We’ll keep you updated on progress in our articles during 2025.
Purple Sweet Snacking peppers and Sugar Rush Peach Stripey chillies We’ve been growing yellow, orange and red Snackbite peppers for a few years now, but we were inspired by a couple of dishes of peppers and chillies we saw at the RHS Festival of Flavours Show at Hyde Hall at the start of October.
The bell peppers we saw on the show bench were called Purple Beauty from memory, but we were doing an order with DT Brown (including our NVS member discount!) and saw that they did a purple variety, Purple Sweet Snacking, so we’re going to give that a go.
The chillies are the variety that we saw exhibited at Hyde Hall. Whilst we were
Atylade tomato
there, we were chatting to Chris Spree and he mentioned that he finds that the easiest way to cultivate chillies is to plant the whole chilli and then wait for its flesh to decompose and the seeds will start
to germinate. Therefore, when it came
to lifting time at the end of the show, we asked the lady who had exhibited the dish whether we could have a chilli each to take home and try and grow, and she kindly obliged. So two new things for us there – a new variety, and a new way to germinate the seeds – thanks Chris!
Big Mama and Koralik tomatoes
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again – we can’t help but try new tomato varieties every year!
The Big Mama look quite similar to Olivade and Atylade, large plum shaped varieties that we’ve grown before. However, the blurb suggests they’re prolific croppers and delicious for soups and sauces, so that was us sold.
The Koralik are a red cherry variety but are an early cropping bush variety. We’re led to believe that they are originally a variety from Poland, so are supposed to do well even in short, wet growing seasons (not that that’s what we’re wishing for in 2025!) They also look to be one that we can try in a container or hanging basket.
Clemsons Spineless okra
So the okra aren’t technically “new” for 2025, but we were a bit late to the party with them in 2024. In April, I decided I wanted to try my hand at growing okra as we really enjoy eating them in curries and stews. Thanks to Amazon Prime, a packet of seeds arrived the following day and we
Tasty King cucumber
sowed them straight away. We tried two plants and Mum and Dad had three.
Needless to say, we got one okra off each plant, yes, a single okra. They tasted nice
in the curry we put them in, but the plants didn’t get enough chance to develop before it was the point in the year when they started producing fruits. Therefore, the plan for this year is to sow them much earlier, along with the chillies and peppers and see whether we have any more success.
Orange Skinny Hot chillies
Sugar Rush Peach Stripey chillies
Basket of Fire and Hot Prairie Fire chillies
Clemsons Spineless okra
Simply Vegetables 9