ArcaMax

Last week, we looked at the flowers that won the 2025 All-America Selections awards, and this week, we look at the five new vegetable winners.

The AAS testing program is an independent nonprofit organization that tests new plants. They have about 80 test gardens from Alaska and Canada to California and Florida. They also have almost 200 display gardens all across the continent that are used not for judging but to show gardeners how well the plants grow locally.

The judges evaluate the plants all season long, not just at the end of season harvest. Only the entries with the highest nationwide average score are considered worthy of a national AAS Award. Some plants will do better in a hot, dry climate or a cool, humid region and wouldn't win a national award, so the country is divided into six regions where a plant might win one or more regional awards.

The vegetable plants are evaluated for desirable qualities such as earliness to bloom or harvest, disease and pest tolerance, novel flavors, total yield, the length of harvest, and overall performance.

I will mention again that one of last week's flower winners, Nasturtium, has leaves and flowers that are edible with a strong pepper flavor.

Another winner with a peppery flavor is Konstance Kohlrabi. Kohlrabi is a fat-stem vegetable created by selecting plants from the natural wild cabbage. Our regular cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts and others all come from selections of wild cabbage. This is a purple-stem variety that has a crisp, sweet cabbage flavor that can be cooked or eaten raw. It matures over a longer time, giving gardeners a longer harvest time.

Continuing today's pepper theme, we have Pepper Pick-N-Pop Yellow. A single 2-foot-tall plant can grow 50-100 of these 4-inch-long sweet peppers. They produce over a long season, starting just two months after planting into the garden and continuing until frost. With a Scoville heat rating of 0, they can be eaten right off the plant or added to any recipe.

Pattypan-type squash look like alien spaceships. A lot of gardeners don't grow them, but they should. Green Lightning is striped with light and dark green stripes and could be used as a decoration, but inside the fruit is a delicious edible flesh. It is bush-type squash, so it doesn't spread, and the fruit weighs 1-2 pounds.

The Thriller squash is a 1- to 2-pound squash growing in what is called the dumpling shape. It is taller than wide and almost square, and it has a flat top and wide ridges. The furrows mature to orange, while the ridges mature white with green speckles and spots. It is very pretty and edible at the same time.

The last vegetable is the one we are all waiting for: a new cherry tomato. OK, maybe not; there are so many types of tomatoes, why do we need a new one? Well, maybe because Tonatico has everything we want in a cherry tomato. The judges said it has great flavor, high yield, high disease resistance to common diseases and very few fruit that crack open -- all on a plant that stays under 5 feet tall and starts bearing 150 to 200 fruit in just 60 days after transplanting into the garden. It can even be grown in a container, such as a 5-gallon bucket. It is a regional winner in the mountain, southwest and northeast zones. All of the other vegetable winners in 2025 are national winners.

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Email questions to Jeff Rugg at info@greenerview.com. To find out more about Jeff Rugg and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Copyright 2025 Jeff Rugg. Distributed By Creators.