Okay… since it’s that time of year… let’s talk trial varieties.

Tex Cuban grain corn (grew a small amount last year for seed – did well)
Floriani grain corn (as recommended by Mother Earth News)
Black Amber Cane sorghum
Lacinato (dinosaur) kale
Rosita eggplant
Strawberry Watermelon
Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage
Peredovik black oil seed sunflower
Scarlet Nantes carrot
Kebamka shell beans
Buckwheat
A new variety of cassava (snagged from a Master Gardener friend)
Boniato
Purple Kohlrabi
USDA seed bank “Green Dent Corn”
Chaya
Dwarf papaya
Perennial Mallow (of some sort… it’s hard to ID stuff when you randomly nab seeds off random plants at some random Ag. Extension)
Solanum quitoense (Naranjilla)
Prickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica)
West Indian gherkins

I’m also working on starting some rarer plants from seed. Carob, strawberry tree, Siberian pea shrub (which isn’t quite supposed to grow here), Mountain papaya (Carica pubescens), and a half-dozen other things I can’t remember right now.

Anyone trying anything new and cool this year? Anything work really well last year?