Variety is the spice of life in the vegetable garden

Lengthening days, the calendar, and, perhaps, hints of warmer air are reminders that it's time to plan for growing vegetables. Probe your memory, talk with gardening friends, and look over scraps of paper where you may have jotted down garden notes to help determine what was worth and not worth growing last year, and what's worth trying this year.

There are so many varieties and sizes of tomatoes, and they vary greatly in flavor. Gardeners Delight, Sweet 100, and Sweet Million are all cherry tomatoes with superb flavor, sweet and tangy, but even better are Sun Gold and Sun Cherry. Among the best tomatoes for cooking are San Marzano and Anna Russian, even if the former variety tastes awful fresh.

Among full-size tomatoes, consistent winners for flavor throughout the country are Brandywine, Belgian Giant and Prudens Purple. Grow one or more of these in your garden and see if you agree.

You'd think that all cabbages would taste pretty much the same. Not so! For superb flavor, try the old variety Early Jersey Wakefield. Same goes for green beans. Blue Lake, Kentucky Wonder, and Roma are among the tastiest, fresh or frozen. As you read through descriptions on seed packets or in catalogues, don't let your eyes fool you. Yellow beans and yellow potatoes may look buttery, but don't necessarily taste that way.

For something new in vegetables, consider soybeans, not those rock-hard, dry soybeans that need hours of boiling, but soybeans that are harvested green, gently steamed, then popped out of their shells. Shirofumi, Envy, and Butterbean are good varieties.

Varietal differences are not dramatic with some vegetables. Differences in texture, size, and shape exist among varieties of broccoli, lettuce, and leek, but they all taste good if grown well.

Don't try so many different varieties that your garden becomes all experiment. As Charles Dudley Warner wrote a century ago in "My Summer in a Garden," such gardens yield "little or nothing to the owner, except the pleasure of expectation." Instead, grow vegetables that have, over the years, proven their worth to you in flavor and yield. If you have never grown Blue Lake and Kentucky Wonder green beans, Belgian Giant tomato, Golden Bantam corn, Jersey Wakefield cabbage, Sweet Italia pepper, Green Arrow peas or Violet Queen broccoli, make some space to give one or more of them a try. They might end up on your annual "must plant" list.