Last week, we looked at the flowers that won the 2023 All-America Selections awards, and this week, we'll look at the five new vegetable winners.
The AAS is an independent, nonprofit organization that tests new plants. They have about 80 test gardens from Alaska and Canada to California and Florida.
They also have almost 200 display gardens across the continent that are not used for judging but rather to show gardeners how well the plants grow locally.
The judges evaluate the plants all season long, not just an end-of-season harvest. Only the entries with the highest nationwide average score are considered to be worthy of a national AAS Award. Some plants will do better in a hot, dry climate or a cool, humid region and wouldn’t win a national award, so the country is divided into six regions where a plant might win one or more regional awards.
The vegetable plants are evaluated for desirable qualities such as earliness to bloom or harvest, disease and pest tolerance, novel flavors, total yield, length of harvest, and overall performance.
Pepper “Wildcat” is a cayenne pepper with extra-large, 2- to 3-ounce peppers. It’s a high-yielding plant with nice thick, fleshy walls that were thicker than other cayenne peppers. The 8-inch fruits are straighter than traditional cayenne fruits with a great smoky flavor and peppery sweetness and a mild pungency of 500 to 1,500 Scoville units. Ease of harvest combined with a very even growth habit and mild heat level make this a good multi-purpose plant for every pepper lover’s garden.
This new “San Joaquin” jalapeno pepper is a determinate jalapeno that sets about 50 peppers per plant all at the same time. This makes it perfect for canning, pickling, and making roasted stuffed jalapenos for a crowd. But no worries if you won’t need them for a while, as they hold their firmness and taste until you are ready to harvest. Judges loved the flavor of the thick-walled fruits that have just a hint of heat at 2,500 to 6,000 Scoville units. Leave them on the plant longer for a beautiful red, and still delicious, jalapeno.
“Sweet Jade” proved itself in the AAS Trials with its high yields of single-serving-sized squash. Each fruit is between 1 to 2 pounds and can be used for single servings of squash, as an edible soup bowl, or in any number of Asian-style dishes where a sweet, earthy, nutritious squash is typically used. Sweet Jade’s deep orange flesh is dry yet sweet and very flavorful whether roasted, baked, or puréed.
“Zenzei” is an early-maturing, high-yielding Roma tomato for gardeners in the Midwest. This regional winner produces a great yield of fleshy plum tomatoes that are perfect for canning and freezing. Neat and tidy plants produce fruits that are uniformly shaped and are easy to harvest on unique bushy yet indeterminate plants. The disease resistance of this new variety will help gardeners be even more successful than before. Each fruit has good internal flesh and fewer issues like spots and blossom-end rot. Plant in full sun and provide stakes or a cage when the plant reaches the appropriate size but there is no need to prune.
My New Year’s resolution when I was a kid was to not eat a whole watermelon in one sitting. Back then, there were no personal-sized watermelons. Now, I can break my resolution with ease as “Rubyfirm” is a personal-sized melon that is about the size of a cantaloupe. Boasting very sweet and crisp flesh with minimal seed pips means a tasty summer delight can easily be yours. Each Rubyfirm plant will yield 2 to 3 fruits on its long vines.
