early planning for next years veggie garden

I know it is early, but I would like to discuss what types of veggies everyone grows.
By that I mean specific cultivars, like I always grow "Blue Lake" bush green beans and "French Breakfast" radishes. I need to try some new cucumbers as I wasn't all that happy with the ones I grew last year.
Summer squash and zucchini, I have a couple favorites, but am open to trying new ones
If we talk tomatoes I have many heirloom varieties that I've grown and some I saved seeds from that I will gladly share. Peppers, eggplants, Swiss Chard???? all good
What do you grow????????????

I always grow the Blue Lake kind and this year my beans did horrible.............I used old seeds and they didn't germinate and I kept trying them and finally they took but by the time they were producing beans the frosts arrived and we only got a few of them :| . I will have to check on the radish varieties to see what exact kind they are. They come up so fast and are very good. I think I grew Straight 8 cukes and they do well here but you are on the other side of the world from here so what grows here may not be good there. We have to use seeds that have a short time to mature or we are in dog doo doo. I grow my toms in the green house cause if the rains hit them they will get the blight. I grow pik red, early girl and a lot of the cherry types like sweet 100, etc. I'm not even going to have a veggie garden next year. Hubby has decided to grow grapes................I'll believe it when I see it :cyclops: . I will still be growing my purple asparagus, onions, lettuce,cukes and radishes for salads. No more corn, peppers, beans or watermelons.............yes I have tried to grow(watermelon) those little tiny short season ones here and let me tell you they do not work here................I've tried for 3 yrs straight and my neighbors think I'm nuts........well I might be but that's beside the point :roll:

We have a grape vine....2 years old and not one grape yet... The blue lake beans were the best thing in our garden this year. I blanched and froze over 30 bags to have in the winter. Also snow peas, more than I could handle so the whole neighborhood got to enjoy those as I didn't freeze any of those. Our friends have grown the straight eight and didn't have that great of results with them so I'm still searching.
We didn't grow Brussel Sprouts and I missed them. They are the best when home-grown and not picked until after a good frost. The blight got our tomatoes this year, cool and wet weather prevailed all summer.

I don't fit in this thread at all. I grew up planting, watering, weeding, hoeing, picking, snapping, shredding, peeling, seeding, slicing, cutting, skinning, squashing, gutting, defeathering, waterbathing, pressure canning, cold packing, pickling, jamming, jellying, juicing, freezing, and everything connected to growing and preserving anything that grew out of the ground, flew in the air, or walked on the ground, except bugs and people. LOL. So because of being an only child, I was stuck helping the men and the women also. So every summer, if I wasn't driving tractor in field, I was helping my mom and grandma in the kitchen. Wonder if they ever fought over who was going to use me that day. LOL.
Anyway, I don't garden or put up much. We had one cucumber plant, one zuchinni, and 2 cherry tomato, 1 grape and one Early girl tomato plants. Two tomato plants got scorched because of a late frost and one died and the growth on the other was stunted a lot. We had a very cold summer and tomatoes didn't do well for anybody but did get quite a few cherry and grape ones. I picked them all and let them ripen in the kitchen.

AWww, thanks for the sympathy. LOL. It was good for me I think. Kept me out of trouble and I learned a lot that I didn't want to know. But I did learn to work and do a good job and be responsible. Kept me in good stead the rest of my life. I have always felt confident that I could survive in any circumstance as long as I was healthy.

Hey Contender beans huh?
those were recommended to me by a friend from church. Do you like them the best? I usually grow blue lake and they always give a good harvest but I like to try new stuff too. I don't think we can grow okra up here in zone 5. I think it takes too long and our season can be shortened by early frost. Safe planting around here is May 15th but we have been known to frost later than that too
I also recommend a zucchini called Costata Romanesca, It grows a HUGE plant and the zukes are the most flavorful we've ever had.

We really like the Contenders. They are a nice straight bean. That makes for easy canning. They produce a very good crop. My favorite for the flavor though is the Roma bean. It's that flat Italian bean.
Yeah, okra is a southern crop. You can almost grow it year round here! lol
We might try that zucchini next year. We usually plant in late March. Our summers are so hot that most things are finished by July!Except the okra, of course. Like I said, you can hardly kill okra down here!

I promise you will not be disappointed with that Italian heirloom zuke. I might have seeds left that i can send you a sample to try as i don't think they are easy to find unless you look on-line

We get a lot of our seeds from catalogs. I've never really noticed the one you mentioned, but maybe it was because I wasn't really looking. I love to mix my yellow squash and the zucchini and bake it. Of course, being in the south, I like it fried the best!

My veggie garden is a tiny little space and I did not grow anything this year because I was trying a eradicate a noxious weed, nut grass, which I allowed to get out of control. This weed is so tough that even RoundUp won't kill it. Sure it will kill what you see on top but next year it pops up again from the seed which is about the size of a small pea.

This year I found a herbicide specifically developed to kill nut grass and thus I decided not to plant anything so I could spray the nutgrass when it popped up. I'm sure I will still have some next year but none the less I plan to plant again come spring. I love Bell peppers and I will likely plant only Bell peppers this coming spring.

I have a few large plastic pots so put what veggies I had this summer in them. The vining ones were trained up the chain link fence at the end of the pool.

I had an invasive thing going for a while in my rock garden. We dug up everything, knocked the soil off the roots, dug away the soil about 4-5" and put it on the back of our property and put in new. It comes up real early in the spring and now I go out with a spoon and dig the new ones that escaped eradication. Some have even jumped into the lawn. This makes beebee size tubers on the roots. If you pull it early in it's development, you usually can get them but if you wait, they all break off and you end up with 93 plants instead of 1. I was warned by the Michigan extension office who diagnosed what it was, that it is called invasive in about 10 states but now I don't remember what it was.