You can’t beat a taste test/field trial combo for vegetable evaluation! It’s a great way to see what the plant looks like (size, yield, colour) and if you like how it tastes. Stokes and President’s Choice only highlighted tomato and pepper varieties, so evaluating the varieties didn’t take too long.

Be warned, my taste may not jive with yours. For example, I can’t drink Tim Horton’s coffee. I find it too bitter. My sister loves the stuff. I prefer Starbuck’s Americanos. There you are…personal preference.

Peppers

Jim Inksetter, Stokes’ Canadian sales manager, pepper tips

To test taste a hot pepper, eat the tip of the pepper first, it’s the sweetest (i.e. less hot) part of the pepper. If you find it bearable then try eating further up the pepper.

Narrow pepper varieties ripen quicker than bell peppers.

Stokes earliest pepper is ‘Sweet Savannah’, a yellow sweet/banana pepper, which takes 60 days from planting seed to harvest.

Sweet Pepper

My absolute favourite pepper was the mellow yellow ‘Gloria.’ Although ‘Gloria’ is a large thick-walled pepper, it tasted fantastic! Sweet, juicy and smooth. Time for glorious ‘Gloria’ to ripen? Seventy days. I’m getting it.

Hot Pepper

‘Cajun Belle’ hot pepper is a real beauty. It’s a compact (2 ft by 2 ft) plant with dark green pointy leaves and cute little red peppers. The pepper is deceptively hot. The pepper heat doesn’t register at first. After a few seconds the heat starts to build up. Suitable for containers.

Tomatoes

For snacking, I prefer cherry/grape tomatoes over large beefsteak tomatoes or even the smaller Romas. Cherry tomatoes are nature’s own snack pack: conveniently packaged. bite-sized and nutritious. No cutting required.

Cherry tomatoes

Golden honey bunch. Yummy & golden grape type tomato on an indeterminate plant (which means the plant keeps growing and will need a support structure). The tomatoes were so good; I kept going back for more.

Heirloom tomatoes

I like the idea of heirloom tomatoes. The history, the open-pollination habit of heirloom tomatoes all appeal to me. Glossy magazines and internet articles all expound on the superior taste of heirloom tomatoes.

In keeping with the current craze of heirloom tomatoes, Stokes provided slices of Brandywine tomatoes. Big shock! I hated the insipid taste and the mealy texture of Brandywine. Assumptions, they will get you every time.

Laurie Scullin, president of the New Product Group, explained some of the disadvantages of heirloom tomatoes:

• Later harvest
• Not resistant to many diseases
• Tomatoes are softer
• Need to be carefully managed for yield and taste

There were more varieties of peppers and tomatoes on the test taste, but none stood out as much as the varieties that I highlighted. Hope this blog has helped you. President’s Choice will have some of the varieties available in the spring. If President’s Choice doesn’t have some of the varieties I mentioned, you can always start from scratch and get the seeds from Stokes Seeds.