A Kaleidoscope of Cultivars
Plant Notes: 2025
Lots of fun new plants this year!
Garden layout: learn how to make tables?
Diamond Sweet Bell Pepper
One of my favorites! This pepper starts out almost white before maturing through soft orange and into the standard bright red.
It's visually the opposite of the more common dark cultivars, and the taste follows. The unripened white pepper has a mild, sweet, fresh flavor, almost completely lacking the bitterness that a green bell has. Between the two this is an excellent pepper to eat raw, especially on salads and the like.
Fully ripened, they're more sweet but still pretty mild. I think they'd mostly vanish into a soup or other long-cooked meal.
The peppers almost all grew in upside down. It seems like a number of non-standard cultivars tend towards shorter stems that can't bend over to let the pepper grow towards the ground. Keeping the plant pruned can help prevent it from ending up with peppers packed together like sardines.
For some reason this pepper didn't start producing until relatively late in the season - it grew quite large before it finally started putting out flowers. I don't remember what seller it was from.
Golden California Wonder Pepper
California Wonder is one of the bog-standard garden peppers, but this one ripens to bright yellow-orange instead of red.
It's pretty, but I don't have much else to say about it - lovely, slightly unique, completely normal taste. A productive monster, like many modern cultivars; mine started producing peppers when it was barely 8 inches high, and the peppers end up large and uniform.
Chocolate Bell Pepper
I picked this one up from a whim, I think but am not sure from a seller called "The Pepper Guy" or something similar - I can't turn up their business online and haven't seen them at markets recently. It's difficult to find an example of the cultivar online, first because the name "chocolate" is more commonly applied to certain varieties of hot pepper, and second because the name has been given to several different cultivars.
Unlike most of the bell pepper cultivars I've grown, which start out a unique color but ripen to red, the chocolate bell starts green and ripens to, well, chocolate. Very pretty, very interesting.
The taste, which seems to be standard for this type of "darker than average" pepper, is a bit more robust and complex than a standard bell. A little more bitter when unripe, but in a full and rounded way. Not quite as bitter as the purples. I frequently ate them raw for the taste, but also made the fully ripened peppers into lots of stews and stuffed peppers; really good for cooking with.
I loved these peppers but didn't get a lot of them; I mostly blame the fertilizer issue, but it's possible the plant was never healthy. Either way it remained small all year and only gave me a few peppers.
Miscellaneous Plants
Got some chives from Ben&Molly's this year! They were great, extremely recommend. I bought chive "seedlings" and ended up splitting the starter into three different plants, all of which were enormously productive. Tons of fresh chives = happy cooking.
Wildlife
For some reason this year I had a lot more tomato hornworms than usual.
Click to see insect.
Well, this is actually a tobacco hornworm (note the red spike instead of black, and the thin unidirectional stripes rather than wider v-shaped stripes). But gardeners tend to refer to these caterpillars by the plant they're found on rather than by their scientific classification.
Tomato and tobacco hornworms, respectively, are the caterpillars of the five-spotted hawkmoth (M. quinquemaculata) and Carolina sphinx moth (M. sexta). A dilemma; the moths are important pollinators, but the caterpillars can destroy crops. Try to keep them out of your gardens, but let them thrive otherwise. They're one of those examples of camoflague working way better than it seems like it should; if you're worried you're missing them, you can try going out at night with a UV light, as they flouresce brightly.
I'll be honest, the caterpillars are so big and squishy that I often just cut off the entire branch I find them on and toss it. I don't like touching them. But a firm grip (nicer to use gloves, but there's nothing dangerous about touching them) can be used to pry them off the branch, too.
However! If you see a hornworm like the one above, covered in little white ellipsoids, let it be! This hornworm is a victim of a parasitoid braconid wasp, probably C. congregata. The wasps have already hatched and gone through their larval stage; you're seeing the cocoons from which the adult wasp will soon emerge. Unlike true parasites, parasitoids kill their hosts, so having braconid wasps around is an excellent defense against getting overrun by hornworms. Let them finish their life cycle and they'll soon be on their way! And don't worry, the tiny wasp can't sting you.
The caterpillar isn't technically paralyzed, but the parasitization has caused it to mostly stop moving and eating, so by the time you see a hornworm in this state it's not a danger to your plants.
Brandywine Tomato
From Ben&Molly's. Brandywine is a variety of beefsteak tomato, which are giant tomatoes with smaller seed compartments (locules) and hence less liquid than many other varieties, intended to eat raw. Brandywine is supposedly one of the tastiest and is probably the easiest to find from garden suppliers, though because of their size beefsteaks aren't used a lot commercially.
"Beefsteak" sounds like a wierd name for a tomato until you slice one of these open.
They're really wierd! If you're used to a more standard variety of tomato these can be genuinely kind of unsettling to slice open for the first time.
But as advertised the smaller seed compartments mean that these are flavor-filled tomatoes that aren't super messy and obnoxious to use in large slices. Excellent producer that makes excellent tomatoes; definitely a standout.
...I won't be growing this variety again, though. It suffers from a problem of modern cultivars where it's been made too good at its job. Its tomatoes are enormous, often cited at up to 2 lbs or 1 kg and nearly 8 in or 20 cm across. This is so big that the branches struggle to bear up under the weight. I had to carefully, individually prop up every tomato on this plant as it started ripening and eventually steal from the rest of my tomato cages because this plant was so heavy that it was breaking my plastic tomato cage. One day after a storm the plant had managed to completely uproot both itself and the cage to fall over (fortunately I just re-buried it and it was fine. It is an excellent, hardy variety!). When I pulled the cage out at the end of the year I found that I had driven the stakes almost two feet into the ground trying to keep it upright.
You could definitely get yourself some heavier-duty stakes/cages and get an absolutely excellent tomato harvest out of these, but until I have more resources to put into my garden it's too much work for me!
San Marzano Paste Tomato
These tomatoes are a legal battleground! This cultivar is under a "protected designation of origin" certificate in the EU, which means that technically if you're not growing it in Campania (not, interestingly, San Marzano; the tomato moved home bases before it got its designation) you can't call it a San Marzano. But they're popular canning tomatoes, so many companies try to sell the cultivar under its official labeling and run afoul of the EU. Wikipedia cites an example of over 1 million euros worth of fradulent tomatoes being seized and destroyed.
I call all tomatoes of this variety romas, but I just looked it up and apparently roma is a specific cultivar; the name for the type is plum tomato. Either way, they're slightly small, ellipsoidal instead of round, and are very fleshy with very little liquid. All of those make them excellent for processing into pastes, sauces, etc. I generally prefer tomatoes with a smaller liquid content because I spent my childhood making way too much tomato juice and sauce and grew to absolutely despise the wierd, stingy feel of too much tomato juice on my hands.
Anyways, I do think these were pretty tasty tomatoes, but I had a wierd thing going on where they kept rotting out from the end so I didn't get too many of them. I never figured out why or how to prevent this, but fortunately it's not a problem I've had with this variety before or since.
You can kind of see the flatter ends of these tomatoes where the process is starting, versus the pointier ends of the tomatoes that aren't suffering from it.
Cherokee Purple Tomato
A relatively recent variety of heirloom tomato which is technically considered a beefsteak but isn't particularly similar to the Brandywine discussed above. Seeds were apparently first collected in Tennessee in 1990, from a man named John Green (not that one) who claimed that the variety had been developed by the Cherokee over the previous century. There's no particular evidence for this, though.
I don't have great pictures of this one from 2025, but I grew them again in 2026, so check there for more information. They're tasty, fun-looking tomatoes that aren't nearly as difficult to keep up with as their larger cousins. Highly recommended!
Sun Sugar Cherry Tomato
A pretty little golden tomato.
I always grow some cherries, more for garden snacking than for kitchen use! These were delicious and sweet, perfect for their intended purpose.
Cherry tomatoes are a little closer to their wild relatives than other cultivars and tend to be more vine-y than other tomatoes. Near the end of the season I measured this plant to be well over ten feet long! I usually start them in a tomato cage but then let them spill over to cross my garden. You can also try pruning them aggressively to keep them a more manageable shape; hopefully I'll try that in the future and report back.
Fertilizer
...and this is the year I learned about nitrogen burn! After the success of the blood meal the previous year, I overdid it this year, shoveling a handful of blood meal into every plant's roots. They quickly faded and crisped, with stunted growth. The only real treatment was tons of watering. I'm not sure the peppers fully recovered, many of them remained small throughout the year.