The Ten Best Vegetable Varieties for Direct Seeding in your Home Garden
Growing vegetables from seeds, or “direct seeding,” in your garden is one of the best things about growing food at home! It can be a challenge to find varieties that are easy to grow, well adapted for your garden, and delicious. So save yourself the trouble and get your hands on some tried and true varieties that we love!
We have grown hundreds of varieties over many years farming and gardening here in the pacific northwest. We have distilled that list down to our all-time top ten vegetable varieties for growing at home. So don’t waste another minute! Get your hands on some these favorite varieties and be ready for Spring!
‘Super Sugar Snap’ Peas
Peas are usually the very first vegetables that we plant in the gardens that we tend. And you won’t find a more reliable or delicious sugar snap pea variety than ‘Super Sugar Snap.’ Peas can germinate in cold soils as early as February. ‘Super Sugar Snap’ makes vigorous and wildly productive vines that will need to be supported by a trellis. They fruit for many weeks, yielding incredible harvests of large sweet succulent pods. A consistent favorite with the kiddos!
While many people grow arugula from starts, we have found that direct seeded arugula yields a higher quality crop with a longer ‘harvest window’. Arugula is very heat sensitive and is best grown in the Spring and Fall. We love ‘Esmee’ for its mild flavor and frilly leaves. Beautiful and delicious, we recommend sowing ‘Esmee’ from seed every 2-3 weeks from early March through late April for a Spring harvest and then again from mid-August through the end of September for a Fall harvest.
So often I hear home gardeners say “I just can’t grow cilantro. It always bolts!” The truth is cilantro is extremely heat sensitive and really shouldn’t be grown from starts. Furthermore, it has a short harvest window so even in the best conditions it won’t last forever. Calypso is quite literally the onlycilantro variety that we grow precisely because it is so slow to bolt! We plant ‘successions’ of cilantro from seed 1x/month from March all the way through September! Growing from seed with multiple plantings and using this slow to bolt variety will have you flush with cilantro nearly year round!
'Calypso’ is the most heat tolerant and slowest bolting cilantro we have ever come across. It’s the only one we grow!
‘Yaya’ Carrots
Carrots are challenging to grow for many gardeners. Like most root vegetables, they really must be grown from seeds (not from starts). Furthermore, they are very slow to germinate and can take up to 3 weeks to sprout! Add to this the tiny seeds, and you have all the trappings of a challenging veggie. But the payoff is huge with incredible yields in small spaces. We love ‘Yaya’ for it’s exceptional flavor and early maturation.
Another pro tip is to purchase “pelleted” seeds which make tiny seeds easier to handle and help with reliable sprouting. We direct sow carrots every 4-6 weeks from early April through the beginning of August and harvest carrots from the garden for 9 months out of the year!
Radishes are one of the easiest root vegetables to grow in the Spring because of reliable germination and a very quick maturation. ‘French Breakfast’ is an ever popular variety with an excellent mild flavor and stunning two toned red and white color. They are so called because in France they are commonly sliced thin and eaten raw on a piece of (heavily buttered) toast. It is an easily acquired taste, I promise! We sow ‘French Breakfast’ radishes from early March through the end of April.
Lettuce grows great from starts, but direct seeding is really the best way to harvest baby greens. Furthermore many seed companies have formulated mixes of different lettuce varieties so you can harvest a salad of mixed baby greens from one sowing! We love many of the mixes from Oregon’s own Territorial Seed Company, and our favorite right now is the ‘Lofty Mix’ which is all organic and features deeply textured leaves for a salad that wants to jump out of the bowl. We sow lettuce mixes from Spring through Fall, but Summer is hard on lettuces, so your best windows for direct sowing will be March-May and August-September.
Most beans are easily (and best) grown from seeds. Our favorite classic green bean is ‘Provider.’ It has a bush habit and produces heavy yields of delicious and sizable 6” pods. We sow beans during the warmer months of the year, typically 1x/month from mid-May through mid-July for nearly 3 months of continuous harvest in late Summer!
Green Beans always grow best when direct sown in the garden. ‘Provider’ is our favorite easy-to-grow bush bean with vigorous growth and abundant harvest.
‘Hakurei’ Turnips
I never thought I liked turnips until years ago when a fellow farmer had me take a chomp out of a raw ‘Hakurei’ turnip harvested fresh from the field. I didn’t even mind the sand in my teeth because the sweetness was so surprising and unique. Since then I have grown ‘Hakurei’ every year. These turnips are quick to grow and gorgeous with bone white flesh and a succulence that is uncommon in other turnips. Like radishes, turnips are very heat intolerant so we seed ‘Hakurei’ during the cooler Spring months from early March through the end of April.
Beets can be challenging to grow, but of all of the beets that we have trialed, we keep returning to ‘Red Ace,’ a classic red beet with excellent flavor and exceptional sweetness when grown in the Winter. Beets can be finicky requiring high fertility, and consistent water, and are also heat sensitive so we recommend sowing them Spring and Fall. The best target dates for beet sowings are early April (for an early Summer harvest) and mid-July (for a Fall and Winter harvest). Like carrots, we recommend “pelleted seeds” to help with reliable germination.
Beets are difficult to grow, but ‘Red Ace’ has been the most reliable producer in our gardens. Highly recommended!!
‘Renegade’ Spinach
Like most of the tender leafy greens, Spinach grows very well when direct sown. There are so many good options when it comes to spinach. We love Renegade for its reliable germination, quick Spring growth, and disease resistance. It is smooth leaved, succulent, and great for Spring or Fall plantings. We so ‘Renegage’ Spinach from early March through the beginning of May and then again in late August-early October for a Fall/Winter harvest.
Learn how to grow Kale in your home garden in this blog post from Portland Edible Gardens. We'll cover varieties, timing, pests, and more and set you up for kale success!
Learn how to grow Kale in your home garden in this blog post from Portland Edible Gardens. We'll cover varieties, timing, pests, and more and set you up for kale success!
