Variety Trials 101
Every year, we pick a handful of crops that we want to test in variety trials. What’s a variety trial? Thanks for asking! A variety trial is like a pageant for vegetable varieties, but instead of evaluating for congeniality or swimwear we test for color, vigor, flavor, and other things a gardener or farmer might care about. The variety trial winners are the crops we grow for seed the following season. Only the best for you! This year, we’re trialing six types of dill, six yellow bush beans, eight red leaf lettuces, six different cilantros, five kinds of popcorns, five serrated arugulas, and four varieties of purple sprouting broccolis. It might be an overly ambitious list, but our nerdy biology brains can’t get enough of this stuff! We plan on publishing the results on this blog so we all may learn how varieties stack up to one another and our customers will understand how we choose our seed crops.