Derek Fell - Derek Fells Grow This!: A Garden Experts Guide to Choosing the Best Vegetables, Flowers, and Seeds So Youre Never Disappointed Again

To the memory of all the plant breeders who worked to create flowers and vegetables the likes of which the world had never seen: people like Florence Bellis, for her hardy Barnhaven primroses; Dr. Orie Eigsti, breeder of the first commercially successful seedless watermelons; Pauline Henry, for her Siloam series of hybrid daylilies; Ted Torrey, breeder of many milestone home garden vegetables including Ambrosia cantaloupe; George Russell, for his sensational Russell Hybrids lupines; Henry Eckford, father of the modern sweet pea; Charles Weddle, eminent petunia and zinnia breeder; Leslie Woodriff, who took the pioneer lily-breeding work of Jan de Graaff to new heights; Professor A. P. Saunders, pioneer peony breeder; Mulford Foster, who trekked the jungles of Brazil for bromeliad species to hybridize; New Zealander John Eaton, who died soon after learning that his Bright Lights chard had been honored by All-America Selections; also Claude Hope, who left government employment in Washington, DC, to establish a breeding facility in Costa Rica for the production of hybrid flowers, notably coleus, impatiens, and petunias; Charles Grimaldi, a San Francisco nurseryman who developed new honey-scented, repeat-blooming angels trumpets; Walter Joblonsky, a Polish immigrant living in Indiana, who gave the world the most widely planted daylily of all time, the everblooming Stella dOro; and, before him, Professor A. B. Stout, who hybridized hundreds of early daylily varieties at the New York Botanical Garden; plus the many other people you will meet in this book or whose work has influenced the decisions you make at seed racks and in garden centers each year.

And, of course, we must never forget Luther Burbank, the plant wizard, who bred the famous Russet Burbank potato and more than 800 new plant varieties.

Selection is the beginning and end of plant breeding.

Luther Burbank,
American botanist and horticulturist

G ardening is one of the most pleasurable activities known to mankind, full of expectations of a bountiful harvest of tasty, garden-fresh vegetables, or of dazzling color and sweet fragrances from drifts of flowers outdoors, or of armloads of flowers ready to be made into beautiful arrangements. The garden can be a quiet sanctuary where all the troubles of the world seem to disappear, and where the miracle of germination and growth can yield continuous harvests through all four seasons, not only by succession planting but through various kinds of storage for fruits and vegetables and through dried arrangements of everlasting flowers.

The garden can also be a place of bitter disappointment, unfortunatelywhere the time and energy we invest in planting and nurturing can produce meager results. Perhaps it is the consequence of planting an unfamiliar tomato variety that ripens too late, or a pathetically small crop of peppers as a result of a prolonged cold spell early in their development, or a starchy-tasting sweet corn that the seed catalog claimed to be supersweet and delicious. Even easy-to-grow annuals can disappoint. Most seed packets wont warn you about the mildew that attacks certain zinnias, and you may not know that certain flowers, such as seed geraniums, shatter after a downpour, leaving you with 2 weeks of a weak floral display as the plants struggle to recover.

Even when you have good soil, perfect growing conditions, and generous amounts of time to care for your garden, you may have disappointing results because of the variety you choose to plant. And thats the reason for Derek Fells Grow This! I want to share the information Ive gleaned over the years about vegetable, annual, perennial, herb, and lawn grass varieties, providing very specific reasons why one variety is recommended over another. I also want to provide the names of varieties that are poor performers or obsolete but that still find their way onto seed racks and garden center tables because they are cheap to produce or because they look good for a few weeks in a six-pack. It is often difficult for merchants to strike a balance between salesmanship and honesty about plants, but I believe that by learning the pros and the cons, you can make informed choices about what will, and wont, work in your garden. Ultimately, all of us want plants that grow and thrive and remain easy to care for, and thats the whole reason that plant breeding and hybridization existto continuously improve a plants habit, bloom time, hardiness, and health so that all gardeners have success when they grow it.

Author Derek Fell in a planting of Rudbeckia Indian Summer at Cedaridge Farm

I hope youll find helpfuland vitalinformation and advice for more than 600 plant variety recommendations and cautions to ensure that you make the right plant choice every time. While all of us want every plant to grow beautifully and yield bountifully, few of us have the time to evaluate plant varieties by growing them side by side or by visiting test gardens and making notes on comparison plantings. And so we buy, plant, and nurture varieties in our own gardens, using trial and error to see what grows and tastes best in any given year. And that can be time consuming and frustrating, not to mention expensive.

I believe you can trust my variety recommendations because Ive spent a lifetime in the garden and built a career around plants and growing, and Im anxious to share what Ive learned. I began gardening at the age of 6 when my grandfather gave me a packet of peas to plant in our backyard during World War II, and at the age of 17, I wrote my first garden article, interviewing champion growers of vegetables and flowers at the Shrewsbury Flower Show in England. At age 19, I worked as catalog manager for Europes biggest and oldest-established seed house, interviewing plant breeders and presenting their new varieties of vegetables and flowers to the general public. At age 25, I was appointed catalog manager for Burpee Seeds, Americas largest mail-order seed house, and I had an office that overlooked Burpees Fordhook Farm test plots. I introduced to the world Burpees Ambrosia melon, Burpees Golden beet, and Burpees Lady series of compact, large-flowered American marigolds, as well as other outstanding varieties bred for home garden performance (as opposed to commercial field production).

At age 30, I became a US citizen and was appointed director of All-America Selections, the national seed trials. I supervised the test gardens, the judging, and the subsequent publicity of award-winning plants, and I traveled the world visiting plant breeders to encourage them to enter their best new varieties for consideration as an award winner. I was responsible for introducing milestone award winners, such as the Sugar Snap pea, Melody Hybrid spinach, Snow Crown cauliflower, Premium Crop broccoli, Yellow Baby watermelon, and other superior vegetables, plus superior flowers such as Magic Charms dianthus, Butterfly snapdragons, Redskin dahlia, Southern Belle hardy hibiscus, and Summer Carnival hollyhock. I introduced to America from Holland the first commercially successful all-male asparagus and the amazing Tomato-Potato, a graft that grows red ripe Sub-Arctic tomatoes on the vine and Red Pontiac potatoes in the soil. I am helping to save the heirloom stringless snap bean Lazy Wife from being lost to cultivation by growing seed of the original variety every year for the past 45 years.