The Edible Garden Show and interesting veg...

We're aiming to try and grow a few more interesting foods this year, it's all very well doing a load of onions, potatoes and beans but there's a lot to be said for trying to grow some things you can't buy quite as easily in the shops. To that end I recently bought a copy of A Taste of the Unexpected by Mark Diacono which has proven to be an inspiring read and I've now got things like Yacon, Egyptian Walking Onions, Daylillies and Kai Lan on my list of weird and wonderful veg I want to try growing this year.

With that in mind I was doubly looking forward to a trip to The Edible Garden Show on Saturday. Unfortunately all bar one of the seed companies selling their wares were offering nothing but the bog standard favorites which seemed a huge missed opportunity to me considering who the show was aimed at. Other than that though we had a fun day browsing through all the stalls and could have spend hundreds of pounds if only we'd had the spare cash.

The one company exhibiting that did offer some unusual seeds was Heirloom Tomatoes Ltd who had a great selection of tomato seeds and plants as well as a sprinkling of cucumber and squash seeds too. We came away with the four packs you can see above which were Red Pear Tomato, Sikkim Cucumber, African Horned Cucumber and some Hooligan Squash. I'm especially looking forward to seeing how the African Horned Cucumbers turn out, they look so strange they'll be very interesting to try, assuming we can grow them!

The plan is to get the new seeds sown tonight and then start focusing a bit more on the allotment for the rest of the week to get the first and second early spuds in and to make sure everything is still on track for when things need to be planted out.