Which varieties have impressed you in 2013?

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PLUMPUDDING
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Just for starters - Courgette Romanesco Latino from Marshalls. This had an excellent flavour and has ridges down it so when you cut it across the slices look like little cogs.

This year the Toscana deep pink flowered strawberry had a much sweeter flavour and is still producing fruits. I was disappointed with it last year flavour wise, so it just shows what a bit of sunshine can do. So I have changed my mind and recommend it as being both ornamental and pleasant flavour.
Three even better strawberries are Marshmello, Mara des Bois, and Frau Mieser Schindler. All excellent flavour and very productive. I'm still picking the Mara des Bois from a tub in the greenhouse.

I've also had a very good crop of peaches from a dwarf peach Bonanza also grown in a tub in the greenhouse. I've picked 35 smallish, but delicious peaches this week. I thinned them out a bit but not enough for it to produce large peaches.

Oh and heritage variety climbing french bean Major Cook's bean from the heritage seed library. This is very productive, completely stringless even when large and the beans have quite fleshy substantial pods with a good flavour. I'm also going to save some for the seeds for stews and to sow again next year.
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Primrose
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I have trialled a tumbling yellow tomato called Tumbling Junior which I planted outdoors in a border, it cropped very early. I picked my first ripe tomato at the end of the first week of July so it,s good to grow in years where blight is prevalent and it has cropped so prolifically as to be almost an embarrassment. The ripe tomatoes (which are marginally smaller than the size of Gardeners Delight) store well as they don't soften too quickly and I've stored lots of them whole in bags in the freezer for use in sauces and casseroles during winter. I will definitely grow them again next year rather than the normal Tumbling Tom Yellow or Balconi Yellow which were the other yellow bush varieties I grew.

I also grew a couple of Ildi yellow cordon tomatoes in addition to the red varieties I grew but this year although they cropped well the tomatoes didn't store well once they ripened and went soft very quickly. This was a disadvantage for me this year because I was preoccupied with other domestic issues and couldn't process my glut quickly enough to stop some of them becoming too soft to use.
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Motherwoman
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Fandango tomato, big, juicy and cooks down well.
Slenderette dwarf french bean just keeps on cropping.
Enorma Elite runner has been a great cropper this year.
Italian Giant Plum Tomato from the Heritage Seed Library could be a favorite in the making too.
Courgette Best of British has been an embarrassment of riches.
Westi
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I'd love to add something positive to this but a bit disorganised with varieties - what did well? - some tomato plants given to me by a mate from her hols in Greece - but she had one season with them in the UK first! They are a beef steak with a tear drop end - hardly any seeds in them, really big & grown outside & despite blight warnings haven't been affected! By disorganised I mean I diligently wrote on all the labels but can't read a thing now & failed miserably with my diary - AGAIN! :(

Must try harder!

Westi
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Wicky
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Well this is only my first year growing veggies, so everything that actually grew impressed me :lol: I'm easily impressed.

I had Dwarf French bean Tendergreen - lived up to its name, really tender and pretty tasty. And I liked the pretty lilac flowers.
Garlic was Cristo - very very pungent! but the cloves are not that big.
Onion Sturon - I was blown away by the size of them, and they are very pungent as well! Good job I like my onions STRONG :)
I grew squashes called Sweet Dumpling - germination was dreadful, out of 1/2 dozen seeds sown I only got one plant :? but boy, it's bloody HUGE and has produced around 9 fruits for me - no idea if this is good or bad LOL
Me cabbages probably could have done with a bigger net around them, I have Golden Acre and they are very small compared with those grown by the experienced gardener on the plot next to me. They are also a bit moth eaten (or rather caterpillar eaten, they grew so big that they pushed through the nettting so the beastly butterflies could poke their bums through the net to lay their eggs)
I tried 2 varieties of carrots - one Early Nantes and cant remember the other type which is just as well as they were rubbish!
Um... that's it really. I've got some generic PSB on the go and Giant Pumpkins which were marketed at kiddies, so there is no variety name on the packet :?
Monika
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garlic Bella Italiano - huge bulbs with large individual cloves
runner bean Moonlight - still going strong after an already enormous crop, stringless, tasty
kohlrabi Violetta - still sweet and tender in spite of me forgetting to harvest some until they were much larger than the recommended cricketball size
French bean Primavera - tender and held well off the ground

Overall, it's been a grand year for both quality and quantity of vegetables for us. And even our one apple tree (Sunset) which usually manages just one or two small fruit has produced more than a dozen huge rosy apples which are just getting ripe!

i wonder what next year will bring?
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glallotments
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Chantenay Royal carrots - one carrot weighed in at over 500g and hadn't lost its sweet carroty taste.
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