Vegetable Varieties That Didn't Make The Cut

While I am generally happy with most of the vegetables I grow, there were a few new things that I tried last year that I will probably never grow again! Since my inventory of tomato seeds has recently ballooned up to about 20 varieties, I'm happy to cross at least a couple of those off my list. Here are the seeds I will not be growing again in 2011:

1. Lemon Lime Basil: This basil was not as vigorous as the regular lind. I'm also not sure why this seed packet caught my eye in the first place. Why would you want lemon-lime scented/flavored basil anyway (that would make some pretty funky pesto)?

2. Pineapple Tomatillo (Groundcherry): I grew this entirely out of curiosity last year. I was completely caught off guard (and pleasantly surprised) by how much fruit the plants produced! However, I wasn't psyched about the flavor. I would describe it as just plain weird. Luckily, my farmer's market customers seemed to like them. I sold out both weeks that I took groundcherries to the market.

3. Mustard Greens: We never ate cooked greens when I was a kid (I'm trying to teach myself to like them as an adult), so I wasn't too sure what to do with these last year. The leaves were prickly and spiny and just didn't seem like they should be edible! I took a few bags to the farmer's market and one customer laughed at me. I didn't realize that between the three bags I brought (which I thought were huge) there were really only enough greens for about one person (since they cook down so much).

4. Anna Russian Tomato: I purchased these seeds because the catalogue description said that the fruit were extremely large for how early they ripen. For Michiganders, this is always a plus with tomatoes. I don't know if it was just a bad year, but the flavor was not good. The fruits seemed very watery and there was some strange off-flavor (bad enough that I never want to devote garden space to this cultivar again).

5. Peach Blow Sutton Tomato: While the flavor of these strange fuzzy tomatoes was actually excellent, the fruit looked unappetizing and discolored. The fruits had a bruised and lumpy look that made me think they were rotting on the vine. Furthermore, their yield was pretty low and the plants were one of the first to get scraggly and diseased looking.

6. Purple-Top White Globe Turnip: As with the mustard greens, we were never fed turnips or turnip greens when I was a kid. However, I recently had turnips in an absolutely delicious Jamie Oliver-style roast chicken with root vegetables. Besides not being very excited about turnips in general, the ones I grew last year were very gnarly and woody looking. I probably left them in the ground too long, but I'd rather just forget about turnips and free up the space for something else this year.

Have you ever grown any varieties that you'll never grow again?