The best new vegetables and fruits of 2024: George Weigel

A lot of winter is still staring us in the face, but for gardeners, it’s a time to dream about the many plants already awakening in greenhouses.

Some of these plants will be new to the market in 2024 – improvements or new twists that haven’t been grown in home gardens yet.

To help you decide which of the newcomers to consider for your 2024 gardens, I’ve scoured the trade and asked numerous experts for what they believe are the best of the best plants making their debut.

Let’s zero in today on 10 of the year’s best new vegetables and fruits.

Next Thursday (Jan. 11), we’ll take a look at the best new annual flowers of 2024, then on Jan. 18 we’ll cover the year’s best new perennial flower introductions. The series concludes Jan. 25 with a look at the year’s best new trees and shrubs.

Some of the following new edibles are already available online and in catalogs. If any strike your fancy, it’s best to order ASAP before the supply dwindles.

Others will show up in local garden centers – seed packets already and plants in April and May.

Fruit Snacks apple trees

Four dwarf, columnar apple trees are the first in this new-for-2024 line of Fruit Snacks fruit plants with the tag line, “Real fruits you can reach and eat.”

Angela Treadwell-Palmer, co-owner of the Plants Nouveau company that’s debuting Fruit Snacks, says the line comes in response to recent home-gardener demand for compact tree fruits that are easy to grow.

“These perfectly upright, dwarf and skinny apple trees make it easier to pick delicious snacks,” she says. “Fruit Snacks are perfect for small spaces. They make lovely hedges and will grow perfectly in pots.”

The four new varieties grow eight to 12 feet tall but only about three feet across. Full-sun locations are best, and two different trees are needed to cross-pollinate and produce fruits.

The varieties also were selected for their resistance to scab and rust – the two main maladies of apple trees.

Debuting in 2024 are: Blushing Delight (green-gold fruits with a red blush); Golden Treat (a slightly tart variety with golden fruits); Tangy Green (a tart, green variety similar to Granny Smith), and Tasty Red (a slightly tart red-fruited variety).

Kitchen Minis

This line of super-small, pot-grown tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers also comes with a tag line: “No garden? No problem.”

Ashcombe Farm and Greenhouses in Monroe Twp. plans to carry two varieties of starter-size Kitchen Mini plants in early spring: a foot-tall, red-cherry-type tomato called ‘Siam’ and a new-for-2024 compact, self-pollinating cucumber called ‘Quick Snack.’

“These are meant for indoor kitchen-window growing,” says Ashcombe co-owner Kerri Laudig. “The plants produce small, snack-size fruits that are perfect for a small family in early spring before the gardening season begins. They’re novel and home-grown fun.”

The potted plants can be moved outside on a patio or table top after frost so long as they’re still producing.

‘Quick Snack’ also is winner of the 2024 National Garden Bureau Green Thumb Award for the year’s best new edible in both the People’s Choice and Professional Choice categories.

The Kitchen Minis line, produced by Pan American Seed, includes two other compact cherry tomatoes, three mini sweet peppers, and six varieties of miniature hot peppers.

Mermaid’s Tale collards

An intriguing novelty of 2024 is a new plant that’s the product of combining a cabbage with collards.

Growers at Fruition Seeds, the Naples, N.Y.-based proprietor of Northeast-regional organically grown varieties, crossed ‘Mermaid’s Tale’ cabbage with ‘Hen Peck’ collards and got a kaleidoscopic offspring they’re calling ‘Mermaid’s Aurora.’

About half of the seeds produce cabbage heads, but the main harvest comes from the leaves – all of which are edible and come in variable leaf shapes and colors (primarily blends of green, purple, and pink).

Fruition co-owner Petra Page-Mann says ‘Mermaid’s Aurora’ is both good-looking in the garden and sweet and tender in the taste department.

The variety can be directly seeded in the ground as early as peas (mid to late March in the Harrisburg area). Young leaves are ready to eat in 25 days up to about 70 days for cabbage heads. It grows best in cool weather and full sun.

Broccoli Purple Magic

Another tasty new good-looker is this purple broccoli that’s one of just two new vegetables that did well enough in nationwide trials to earn 2024 All-America Selections honors.

Purple Magic has “beautiful purple color that extends throughout the heads and stems,” said one AAS judge. “And it had a true, strong – in a good way – broccoli flavor.”

Purple Magic plants grow about 30 inches tall and produce one large, main head that’s a dark greenish-purple in color. Some plants produce a few side shoots as well.

The stems are more of a magenta-purple color, adding up to what another AAS judge said is “wicked good… the nicest purple broccoli I’ve ever seen.”

Introduced by Sakata Seed, Purple Magic is ready to harvest about 90 days after transplanting plants.

Like most broccoli, Purple Magic plants grow best in full sun and in the cool spring season, although the variety also has better-than-average heat tolerance.

Pepper Red Impact

The sweet pepper Red Impact is the second national AAS vegetable winner for 2024.

AAS judges liked it for its large fruits, heavy yield, thick walls, and superior flavor.

“It’s much sweeter than other varieties and loaded with fruits for a high-yielding gem,” said one judge.

The Seminis Home Garden introduction produces 10 to 15 fruits per plant that average about eight inches in length.

“The sheer size of these peppers is astonishing,” said another AAS judge. “They are literally almost 100 percent larger than other varieties.”

Red Impact fruits mature from green to red, about 75 days from transplant.

Plants grow 28 to 36 inches tall (figure on staking them), they have excellent disease resistance, and they do best in full sun.

Cauliflower Purple Moon

If you like the idea of purple broccoli, you might also like this new purple-headed cauliflower from Johnny’s Selected Seeds.

Instead of traditional white cauliflower, Purple Moon produces large heads of medium-dark purple. That’s not a first in itself, but the improvement here is that the heads are ready to pick in a market-fastest 62 days.

To gardeners, fast maturity means there’s less time for anything to go wrong before scoring a harvest (bugs, bunnies, hailstorm, etc.)

Johnny’s says Purple Moon is also the company’s best-performing purple variety in warm weather and makes an excellent fall crop in addition to a spring one.

Plants grow 18 to 24 inches tall and do best in full sun.

Pepper Prism

Another new pepper worth checking out is this compact bell pepper that produces a variety of fruit colors over weeks of production.

I test-grew Prism in a container last season and got dozens of fruits – each sized somewhere between the size of a golf ball and tennis ball. The fruit colors varied from cream to light green to pale orange to red.

The flavor and yield were both very good. So was disease resistance.

Prism is a Burpee Home Gardens introduction that grows 20 to 30 inches tall, ideally in full sun, in pots or the ground.

Full-sized green fruits are ready in about 60 to 65 days, while red ones take about 75 to 80 days.

Tomato Love Sunrise

A second interesting 2024 vegetable from Burpee Home Gardens is Love Sunrise, a beefsteak-type tomato that produces 10-ounce, heart-shaped fruits.

Katie Rotella, spokeswoman for the Ball Horticultural Co., which markets the Burpee Home Gardens brand, says this new tomato “is a feast for the eyes as well as the palate” with its “sunrise colors of red, orange, and yellow.”

Love Sunrise fruits end up as a yellow bicolor about 85 days after transplant into the garden.

Plants are indeterminate (meaning they continue to produce fruits until frost) and grow about five to six feet tall, ideally in full sun.

Tomato Tiny Temptations

The compact plant size and unusually sweet fruits of this new line of hybrid tomatoes are what earned the Tiny Temptations Orange version a 2024 Fleuroselect Gold Medal award in European trials.

The Totally Tomatoes catalog is debuting both the Red and Orange varieties of Tiny Temptations, calling its cherry-type fruits “ultra-sweet” and citing the line’s heavy yield, crack-resistant fruits, and disease resistance.

Plants grow a compact, bushy 16 inches tall and 14 inches wide, making it ideal for container-growing.

Tiny Temptations is a determinate variety, meaning it ripens all of its fruit over a few weeks instead of producing all season long.

Blueberry Bountiful Baby

The latest in compact blueberries is this new, good-yielding and good-looking introduction from California’s Monrovia growers.

“Bountiful Baby blueberry doesn’t just produce a large crop of delicious blueberries,” says Georgia Clay, Monrovia’s plant selections manager, “it’s also an attractive shrub that looks great in the garden. It stays tidy, grows to just about three feet tall and wide, and has beautiful glossy foliage that turns bright burgundy red in the fall.”

The variety is compact enough for growing in pots on a patio, or it can be planted in the ground. Full-sun locations and acidic soil are best.

Cross-pollination and yield is best when two or more blueberries are planted.

• Read George’s post on best new vegetables and fruits of 2023

Source: pennlive.com