How to Pick the Right Plants for Your Garden: 9 Lessons From a Seasoned Gardener

The author's Albion everbearing strawberries reliably produce well into October on his farm off the coast of Washington state. But finding this dream variety was a process of trial and error. Eric Lucas

“You still have strawberries? It’s October!”

My houseguests were wide-eyed when I set a bowl of the fresh fruits on the breakfast table. It was indeed October, and yes, I still had strawberries—a pint a day. The harvest ended when autumn’s chill descended 10 days later. A few laggards lingered until Thanksgiving.

Unbelievable. My farm is near the shoreline on an island in the Salish Sea—cool maritime climate, they call it.

What’s the cause of the strawberry miracle? Albion everbearing strawberries, a fact that illustrates two important horticultural ideas.

First, many garden catalog descriptions are fanciful at best, bogus at worst. I tried several different “everbearing” strawberries—which produced in June, then again sparsely in August—before finding the Albion variety, whose berries first appear in late May, produce moderately into mid-June, then settle into a three-month-long daily berry bounty. The berries are delicious, and we can’t eat them all, so the freezer is stuffed and I just had some in my cereal this midwinter morning.

The Albion miracle also illustrates one of the most important horticultural lessons: Variety selection is crucial. Perhaps my discoveries around this principle can benefit you, as all those lushly alluring garden catalogs start filling your mailbox.

A harvest of Albion strawberries and Provider bush beans. Eric Lucas

All Gardening Is Local

What works here may not work there—no matter where “here” and “there” are. This is broadly obvious: No one’s growing eggplants in Alaska. But the principle operates on a far more discrete level than sub-Arctic versus subtropical.

“Microclimate” is the term for the subtle but crucial distinctions that exist between sites at very small ranges. My neighbor up the hill from my farm can grow things I cannot (ghost peppers); the lower end of my quarter-acre garden experiences harder freezes than the upper; farms on the mainland just 20 miles from me grow corn I cannot.

So when your shiny bright catalog says something is great for your general area, it’s … possible. Not guaranteed.

I once found a melon variety that actually did produce at my farm—when I planted it in the sunniest, warmest spot in the garden, a flat shelf shielded from wind by a hedgerow, exposed to maximum sunshine, in a little dip where warmth settled. It wouldn’t grow at the very top or bottom of my garden.

To Thine Own Self be True

The first step in the variety treasure hunt is clarity about what you want. For me, it’s flavor first, flavor last, full flavor all the time. After that, reliability; lastly, productivity. I’m largely indifferent to appearance, novelty, and fanciness, and almost every time I was hoodwinked by one of those qualities, it was a failure.

Pink pod green beans are an example. Are they pretty? Sure. Easier to see and thus pick? Yep. Alas, they taste… blah. Same for yellow Romano beans. Nature says green green beans taste best, and that’s that. I’m back peering intently into the vines of the two kinds I grow, Provider bush beans and Fortex pole beans. The flavor is worth the effort. Convenience is a false god. I think there’s a life lesson there.

Know Thy Vegetables as Thyself

After years of sometimes desperate experimentation, I found three kinds of corn that do well at my farm: an ancient yellow flour corn from the Hopi Nation in Arizona (makes luscious cornbread), a full-flavor white sweet corn bred in the Northwest, and a super-hardy flour corn bred by a Montana visionary (Dave Christensen) to stand up to cold springs, hot summers, and drought.

The first two are helplessly water-dependent; if I fail to keep them soaked—disaster. The last, Painted Mountain, is as tough as horsehide, and I can neglect it. I shouldn’t, but I can. That eases midsummer fishing trips.

This may sound troublesome—do varieties of the same vegetable differ that much? Yes, indeed. There are even strains of varieties that differ (called “selections” by horticulturists). It’s complicated. Deal with it.

Painted Mountain corn. Eric Lucas

Names Are Aspirational, Not Definitive

I planted Early Girl tomatoes when I first moved to the Pacific Northwest. Everybody said they were the best choice. After all, look at the name? Wrong. In my gardens, not early at all—and back to a previous point, their flavor is poor. I don’t plant anything called “early” now. Early Wonder beets? Alaska Early peas? Doesn’t seem like a name can jinx a seed, but I’m not taking any chances.

We’re also suffering from nomenclature inflation. Rhubarb isn’t just red any more; it’s “Crimson Red,” a redundant redundancy that would have earned an F from my high school English teacher. We’ve had ’supersweet“ corn types for a couple generations; now we have ’triplesweet.” Maybe we should just plant sugar cubes.

Truth Is Stronger Than Fiction

One of the last refuges of true creative writing is garden catalogs. They’re fun to read, but keep your proverbial grain of salt at hand.

Consider the praise heaped on “Umpqua Beauty” tomato in one of my favorite catalogs: “The fire-engine red fruit can grow upwards of two pounds each … and can be enjoyed much like eating an apple.” Really? An apple? Here’s the story about “Czech Black” peppers from another catalog: “Bears fruit weeks before all our other hot peppers.” Weeks!?

Fiction ain’t dead yet.

Appearance Can be Deceiving

Picture a tomato in your mind’s eye. It’s red, right? My experience with red tomatoes has been calamitous. Brandywine, Stupice, Mortgage Lifter, Momotaro, Oregon Spring, Siletz Slicing—“one of the most reliable slicing tomatoes you can grow.” All these brought productivity busts and were flavorless to boot.

So who says tomatoes have to be red? I get great results with yellow types such as Kellogg’s Breakfast and Sungold. The former are luscious and ripen late (September). The latter are ready much earlier than anything named “early.” Green Zebra tomatoes have buckets of flavor, and so do “black” types, which are actually indigo.

The beat goes on: Gold beets are better than purple. My finest eating apple is a dull leather-gold. Rainier cherries aren’t red either. Yellow carrots are far more robust than orange. The color varieties you see in the grocery store are vegetables designed for industrial production, shipping, and consumer “eye appeal.” No, you cannot grow those glossy plastic Cosmic Crisp apples in your backyard.

Abandon your preconceptions, all ye who enter here.

Touchstone gold beets. Eric Lucas

Don’t Be Afraid of Trial and Error

I tried two other strawberries before Albion. Five kinds of corn; innumerable tomatoes; all those wacky beans; red, purple, and striped beets; many carrots; three pumpkins. Some were supposedly specific to my exact climate; some were allegedly not suitable at all. Only trying them gave me an answer.

This is fairly easy with vegetables—but not fruits. Apples, pears, peaches, plums—lard them up with unlimited water and manure and it still takes five to six years before they begin mature production. It’s best to focus on heirloom types that have been steadfast in your region for generations—for instance, Gravenstein apples on the West Coast.

I tell people to start early in life. After 50 years, you'll have answers. Not all, but some.

So get going. Don’t wait.

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

Oh, the temptations of “new.” Advertising research has long shown that the no. 1 most effective marketing gimmick is “new.” You don’t have to change a thing, just call it “new.” Fickleness seems to be part of the human condition.

Many times I have been lured down the primrose path of temptation by some Jezebel seed variety. I forsake my old reliables, only to find that the new version is a flop. The lesson here is, sure, try new things, but not at the expense of your established successes.

This isn’t as simple as it sounds: For instance, corn’s wind-blown pollen leads to notoriously unstable results, so you need a really large garden to try out new types. The same goes for pumpkins and squash. I have a quarter-acre, I have three varieties of corn I love, I’m not going to monkey with it any more. (Or beans, pumpkins, summer squash, carrots, strawberries, and beets.)

Lima beans. Eric Lucas

Treasures Are Worth Saving

The one and only melon type that I successfully grew was a bit of a farmer’s fantasy—my climate isn’t suitable for melons, and I barely managed a half-dozen fruits that ripened in late September on the kitchen windowsill. Even so, they were quite good, and I enjoyed the novelty. It was bred long ago specifically for my island, and so named, San Juan.

They’re gone. “Lost to cultivation” is the term. No seeds to be found on this continent. I’ve prowled the internet, called a few places, prayed to the gods. Nada.

Complicating the issue is the fact that there’s a completely different melon also called “San Juan”—from Puerto Rico. That won’t grow here.

I should have saved the seeds from my last crop, two years ago.

Horticultural fashion is what dictates variety production. It has very little to do with long-term home gardening value. If you love a rare variety, learn seed-saving. I did this long ago with a large cool-climate lima bean; now I may be the only person on Earth growing it.

This all seems complex, and it is. There are an estimated 5,000 known varieties of chile peppers; 10,000 tomatoes; 7,500 for apples; hundreds for beans. But navigating this universe of types fends off dementia, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, and boredom. Variety really is the spice of life. Start digging.