Since many of you might have your noses in those seed catalogs, let’s talk about northern genetic selection!
Now, many of you know we (purposefully) don’t provide a list of varieties that we grow or know to be successful. The reason for this is that far northern agriculture is “relatively new,” featuring at most 100 years of research and practice. When compared to thousands of years of agriculture across human history at lower latitudes, it’s vitally important us northerners experiment and develop further knowledge.
However, what we will say is that with pretty much all cold tolerant and frost tolerant veggies, the varieties you choose simply do not matter. So go nuts, get what looks good to you! It’s mostly only those “warm loving” plants (like tomatoes, peppers and so forth) where varieties can actually make a huge difference.
The other truth is that you cannot grow plants that significantly exceed your frost free growing days. This is the number of days between your average first and last frost dates. (For us, it’s about 100-110 days.) You can get away with “borderline,” but don’t expect to grow a 180 day plant in a 100 day growing season. This especially impacts Brussels sprouts and some pepper varieties, since many can see very long maturity times.
There are other “rare” exceptions to these guidelines, such as with artichokes and onions. There, we need artichokes that produce in the first season, such as Green Globe. For onions, any “long day” variety will be adequate, whereas short day varieties will be impacted by our long summer nights.
This topic is a little too vast for us to fully encompass in a post, so we drafted a more thorough deep dive article on the subject. You can find it down in the comments.
This article also has a video we produced on northern variety selection. It’s intentionally vague, just like this post is, but it dives into some of the more important nuances about this topic. In it, we discuss “traits” we look for across ten different vegetables.
I know it’s “comfortable” to do what others are doing. We’ll definitely give away plenty of our “variety secrets” as the season rolls on! But, our main objective is to teach you all to be northern “citizen botanists,” by understanding the principles and not “cheat sheets” that don’t evolve northern growing!
