Heirloom Russian Tomato Varieties

I grow a lot of different varieties of tomatoes.  Some are very old heirloom tomato varieties, while others I am developing myself.  

Some of the tomatoes I grew 

Some of my favourite tasting tomato varieties are old Russian heirloom varieties.  As a generalisation, Russian tomatoes have been bred for rich tastes and high productivity.  There are very few heirloom tomatoes in Australia that can rival the flavour of the old Russian varieties.  

I always used to be under the impression that Russian varieties would be quick to ripen and not mind the cold (unless there is frost) and perform well with short days with only weak sunlight.  From what I understand now, that is not always the case as many Russian tomato varieties were developed for greenhouse culture.  That is ok as they make up for any short comings in having a deep and often complex tomato taste that is hard to beat.  

Unfortunately I have not grown very many heirloom Russian tomato varieties.  I would like to grow a few more of them as their taste is often superb.  Some of the Russian tomatoes I have grown are listed below.

I like tomato season 

Japanese Black Trifele - Yaponskiy Trufel Chernyyi   Японский трюфель

Tomato - Japanese Black Trifele

Japanese Black Trifele is a great Russian heirloom tomato and one of the few varieties that I will grow each and every year.  They produce mahogany brown, pear shaped fruit, that is often green on the shoulders.  The size and shape of the fruits varies a little even on the same truss.  Apparently it was named 'Japanese' to make it sound more exotic, but was developed in Russia and it is a commercially produced tomato in Russia.  These produce a large yield for me every year under different conditions, and they taste incredible.  They are great raw or cooked.  This plant has potato leaf and is indeterminate.

Malakhitovaya Shkatulka - Malachite Box - Малахитовая Шкатулка

Tomato - Malakhitovaya Shkatulka

Tomato - Malakhitovaya Shkatulka

Malakhitovaya Shkatulka is another great Russian tomato.  The size and shape of the fruit lend it to slicing for sandwiches, and it goes well in a salad.  Everyone who tastes this has loved it.  It is difficult to tell when they are ripe from a distance, but you are close enough to touch them it becomes pretty simple.  They tend to have small yield in my garden, I wish that it was higher yielding as they taste so great.  It is often said that Russia does not produce green when ripe tomatoes, often when being sold in Russia it is listed as having yellow skin.  I don't care how you describe it or what colour you want to call it, this variety tastes great.

Giant Siberian Pink - Sibirskiy Velikan Rozovyi - Сибирский Великан Розовый

Tomato - Giant Siberian Pink

Giant Siberian Pink is a good tasting Russian tomato that produces very large, mostly round, pinkish fruits.  This variety produces firm flesh, and has a decent number of seeds which makes seed saving easy.  This plant produced a medium to large yield (medium number of fruit, super large sized fruit) over the season.  Being a large fruited tomato it does not ripen early in my garden.  

Little Oak Like - malenʹkiy dub, kak   маленький дуб, как 

Tomato - Little Oak Like

Little Oak Like is a great tasting heirloom Russian tomato that is far too rare.  It is only a small plant, maybe a foot tall and wide.  The red round tomatoes have green shoulders and taste great.  Little Oak Like tomatoes have the deep, rich, old fashioned tomato taste that people think of when they think of home grown tomatoes.  This is one of the best tasting red tomatoes I have eaten.  This plant has a large yield over a reasonably long season for a short determinate tomato.  It is usually among the first tomatoes to ripen in my garden.  The fruit are a little small, but more than make up for that by tasting great.

Black Russian - Chernyy Russkiy - черный русский

Tomato - Black Russian

Tomato - Black Russian

Black Russian is probably the most famous variety of heirloom tomato in Australia even though it is one of the worst.  Black Russian tomato is by far the worst Russian tomato I have ever grown!  Crops are small, the fruit cracks often, and it lack any real depth of flavour that you expect from home grown tomatoes.  If you disagree with this I dare say you are either comparing it to the ethylene ripened cold stored garbage from the shops, or with other home grown insipid varieties such as 'Roma'.  Let's face it, a home grown Roma will always taste bland compared to a home grown flavoursome variety.  The colour of the black Russian tomato fruit is amazing inside and out, and they are a good size, unfortunately the taste, yield, and time it takes to mature always let it down severely in my garden.

Various tomatoes I grow

I often sell seeds saved from my open pollinated organically grown plants through my for sale page.  If you are interested please have a look.  

If you are Russian or have a Slavic background, and know about some other traditional vegetable varieties I would love to hear from you.  I would be interested to grow some more Russian vegetable varieties, not just tomatoes but other vegetables as well.  I would love to grow an old Russian beetroot variety but seem unable to find the names of any.  

If you grow some other Russian tomato or other Russian vegetable varieties and would like to swap some seeds or sell me some seeds please also let me know.  Either leave a comment on this blog post or my email address can be found on my for sale page.  

Black Nebula Purple Carrots

I have never been overly good at growing carrots (Daucus carota sativus).  For me they always take a long time to produce decent sized roots, they take up a lot of room for the small crop I normally get, and I am not all that fond of them.  I don't really like raw carrots, but I do like them roasted. 

Years ago I grew mixed colours of carrots.  I liked the yellow ones and found them to be sweeter than orange.  I found white to be bland.  There were some purple skinned ones with orange cores, they were a little more spicey and also quite nice.  

Black nebula carrots

Organic Black Nebula Carrots

I considered trying to breed carrots that were purple the whole way through.  I started this project but didn't make much headway due to competing priorities.

This year I grew "Black Nebula Carrots".  I had read about these and seen a few pictures, but nothing compared to what these beauties did in my garden.  These carrots were purple from the skin right to the core.  

These carrots are the darkest of the dark.  They are so dark I would almost call them black.  They really are incredible to see.

Black Nebula Carrot can have a slightly white core

Purple carrots staining the cutting board

The intense purple colour of black nebula carrots comes from anthocyanins.  Anthocyanins are powerful antioxidants that are found in things like blackberries and blueberries.  Given how dark these carrots are, they extremely rich in antioxidants and are incredibly healthy to eat, far healthier than regular orange carrots.  If you are growing food at home, you may as well grow something that is healthier than you can get from the markets!

All of the carrots I grew have some amount of white, I believe this is largely influenced by environmental factors.  Other than a small amount of white they have dark purple skin and flesh.  The leaves are green and usually have purple leaf stalks.

I found mine did not produce overly long roots, but that may have been the growing conditions.   I won't ever give them perfect growing conditions, so I assume this is how they will always grow for me.  The roots were fat at the top and got skinny pretty quickly lower down.  

The tap root had a lot of tiny side roots, making them appear a little hairy.  This 'hair' looked weird but came off easily just by washing the dirt off the main tap root.

Black carrots cut and ready for roasting

Organic black nebula carrots

I grow everything organically and found black nebula carrots grew easily with no real effort.  We had no pests or diseases in my little patch.  They grew like any other carrot, which I find to be a bit slow but really isn't too bad in the scheme of things.  They weren't overly fussed by much of anything.  

Some of my carrots got a bit dry over summer, then the rains came and made them split a little.  They didn't split too much, so it didn't bother me.  This happens with many crops and was not unexpected given the amount of rain we had.

These dark purple carrots are an heirloom variety that breed true to type, so buying seed once and then saving seed for future crops is the best way to grow them.  Carrots tend to produce enormous amounts of seed, and carrot tops can be replanted and allowed to flower, so it won't take long to select for the best performers in my garden.  The flowers were white and slightly purple, and fed a lot of beneficial insect pollinators.

Black nebula carrots are dark purple

Black Nebula carrots with potatoes

I am told that these have undertones of berry taste.  I can't taste berries at all.  I found them to taste like a mix of carrot and beetroot, I really liked it.  I don't like the taste of raw orange carrot, but I did like the taste of raw black nebula carrots.  Roasted they tasted like roast carrot mixed with roast beetroot.

When we cut the carrots they stained things with their incredible purple juice.  I am told that the juice can be used as a dye, and if you add some acidity that it will turn bright pink.  I will have to try this out one day and see for myself!

These carrots hold their intense colour when cooked.  We roasted the carrots, the roots turned an even darker black.  They looked burned to a crisp as they were coal black, yet they were tender and delicious.  They also stained potatoes that they were touching in the baking tray, making them interestingly purple too.  What fun!

I have seen pictures of carrot juice made from black nebula carrots, and I have seen pictures of carrot cakes made with them.  They look incredible.  I am not a fan of carrot juice but will have to try to make the carrot cake one day as it is crazy dark purple.

Black nebula carrots are the darkest

These black carrots are so high in antioxidants that my son ended up with black lips, teeth, and tongue, much like if he is eating mulberries.  I put them on a white plate which was also stained with a purple berry like stain, again much like mulberries.  Unlike a mulberry, the staining washed off easily.  

I am planting all of the tops from the better carrots in order to let them regrow a little and collect some seed from them.  While I don't expect them to grow another tap root, they can and should flowers and produce seed from a regrown carrot top.  I have planted them in my greenhouse to ensure purity of seed as I assume people in the area may also grow carrots and I do not want cross pollination.  

If I have some spare seed I plan to list it through my for sale page along with various other heirloom vegetable seeds, perennial vegetables, and interesting culinary herbs.  If you are interested please take a look.

Blood Sorrel - Rumex sanguineus

I have grown garden sorrel (Rumex acetosa) for years. I originally had a variety that never flowered, which was pretty great as it always had a lot of leaves. After moving house too many times I lost it. I now have a few seed grown plants, they are all pretty productive.

Garden sorrel is a highly productive perennial leaf vegetable that takes next to no effort to grow. My kids like eating sorrel raw, we also add small leaves to dishes in small amounts instead of silverbeet or spinach. My chickens appreciate being fed sorrel when there are not many other options in the garden. Sorrel leaves are great in the compost, people refer to them as being good compost activators. What that means is these leaves have a lot of minerals that compost microbes need to eat. 

Sorrel is great, but it does not cope with storage or transport. This means you will never see sorrel for sale in the shops, and if you want to eat it you will need to grow it for yourself. This plant is very productive, it produces copious amounts of large leaves. Being a perennial vegetable means you plant once and harvest forever. I don’t find it to be invasive at all, and I dig and move clumps at any time of year as they are not finicky. I find my plants tend to divide a few times each year even under pretty hostile conditions. If I hack a piece of plant off and accidentally do not get any roots they still seem to survive for me, it just takes them a little longer to grow.

I have always considered also growing a related perennial vegetable known as blood sorrel, or red veined sorrel (Rumex sanguineus). This is a very similar plant in every way, except it has green leaves with strikingly red veining. 

 

Blood sorrel is so pretty that people grow this as an ornamental in garden borders.

My daughter holding blood sorrel leaves

I am interested in perennial vegetables, especially things that are low maintenance and highly productive, and I am fond of garden sorrel which is similar. I have also read papers on how blood sorrel is an underutilised food crop, and how it could be used in developing countries to enhance food security. Anything that is being researched as a low input highly productive food crop that may help enhance food security interests me. So I bought some seeds and gave this a try.

There appear to be people selling varieties called ‘raspberry dressing’ or ‘blood spinach’, but as far as I can determine these people are just growing unnamed seed grown plants and the fun names are referring to the species rather than an improved cultivar. There seems to be a little genetic diversity among my plants, and these are simple to propagate by division, meaning it should not be too difficult to breed an improved cultivar if wanted.

Each leaf looks different 

Blood sorrel is said to be very high in vitamin A, vitamin C, iron, potassium, and a few other vitamins and minerals. The leaves and roots have been used for centuries for various healing purposes. I don’t know how well they work, but I do know if someone get hurt by stinging nettle that I can rub and smush a leaf on the site and their pain goes almost immediately. It is easy for my kids, when they are in a panic from pain and blinded by excessive tears, to find this plant in the garden as it is so distinctive. As well as all of this, each leaf has truly beautiful markings.

Leaves with unique markings 

Like most vegetables blood sorrel grows well in full sun or a little shade. It is not bothered by my winters and frosts do not seem to be any issue. It gets a bit hot and dry over summer without any damage, above 40C and some leaves get burned, presumably too dry would also be a problem. I grow in poor soil, but it grows faster and leaves get larger in better soil. No pests or diseases appear to bother it, but poultry will eat it to the ground, and kids will graze on it every day until it is just a leafless stump.

Leaves can be eaten raw or cooked. Just like French sorrel there are numerous recipes that use this plant as the hero of the dish, as well as many that use this as a side dish. The colour is pretty amazing in a garden salad, people often pick the smaller leaves for this purpose so as not to diminish from how pretty it is. Like many other leaf vegetables it is high in oxalic acid, it is safe to eat but you probably don’t want a diet that consists solely of this.

Seedlings looking good 

Blood sorrel is a perennial vegetable that is just as edible and nutritious as garden sorrel, except the red colouration is a little healthier for you. The taste of blood sorrel seems pretty much the same as regular sorrel but less acidic. Young leaves are tender and mild in taste, as leaves grow larger they become more lemony.  I find garden sorrel to be a bit too sour, but blood sorrel is less sour.

I only have younger plants, so my blood sorrel has not grown as large as my several year old garden sorrel. I am told they will be much the same size, and should divide with much the same vigour. Even the shape of the leaves is pretty similar. 

My daughter sees hearts in the markings 

At this stage I have no idea if these two species can cross to produce intergeneric hybrid plants. If they can I assume they would display hybrid vigour and hope that the resultant plants would be massive. The flowers are a bit small and difficult to work with for a few reasons, and I am not sure how compatible these species are or if this cross is possible under any circumstances, so I may not ever get around to attempting to make this cross. If you have ever tried to make this cross or can send me a link of a peer reviewed paper where this has been attempted please let me know as I would love to learn more.

I have seen photos of people growing blood sorrel as an ornamental, and they do look incredible. I think growing a row of alternating green garden sorrel with green and intensely red blood sorrel would look amazing. Being so ornamental, if times get tough and you need to grow food from a survival garden I think most people would overlook these.

If you have a little extra space in your garden I think blood sorrel are well worth growing. They are nutritious, simple to grow, healthy to eat, possibly medicinal, and high yielding. If nothing else, they are very ornamental and would draw comments from visiting gardeners as they oooh and aaah over your amazingly ornamental vegetables.

Blood sorrel divides readily, and grows easily from seed.  If I have any extra plants I will list them on my for sale page along with other perennial vegetables and interesting edible plants/seeds.

Potato seedlings from true potato seed Australia

I was transplanting my seed grown potatoes the other day.  I have a few different breeding lines, some diploid, some tetraploid, some wild ancestors of modern potatoes, all grown from true potato seed.  

Growing from true botanical potato seed yields interesting results, and allows me to breed and create new varieties.  As the parent stock is usually quite heterozygous, each seedling is genetically unique.

Most of my potato seedlings looked much the same, some had a few stolons, others did not.  At this tiny size neither is unexpected.  One of my seedlings is producing tiny little tubers.

I can hardly wait to see what these turn into.

Potato seedling with tiny tubers

I didn't break this off, there is soil covering the stolon

This little seedling really wants to live!  It had 3 tiny little tubers (not all of them are in my photos) and a few other stolons.  It has since been planted in its own pot so I can evaluate it at the end of the season.

I mostly try to grow diploid potatoes as I find they taste better.  Unfortunately they tend to yield lower than tetraploids.  

These seedlings are from tetraploid potatoes, their parentage is far superior to anything you can get from the shops so I decided to try a few seedlings and see what I could produce.  It is far too early to tell, but hopefully something great comes out of this line.

I sell a small number of seed potatoes each year through my for sale page.  These are from lines that I have developed myself and grown from true potato seeds.  I can only do this in their correct season, some lines harvest several times per year, other lines only harvest once per year.  If you are interested keep an eye on my for sale page.

Growing white asparagus at home

You have probably seen, or at least heard of, white asparagus.  There are no varieties of white asparagus, but the good news is that you can make any variety of asparagus grow some white spears at home easily. 

Normally to make asparagus white the grower will blanch the asparagus by putting a bucket or something over the emerging spear.  As it grows it has no sunlight, meaning it stays white.  This is simple to do at home if you are growing asparagus.  The end result is a much sweeter asparagus spear.

Often people use any of the green varieties to make white asparagus.  This works well.

Purple varieties of asparagus are much sweeter than green to begin with.  Which means white asparagus made from a purple variety is very sweet, it's quite remarkable.

Making white asparagus at home

This year I decided to make white asparagus using a purple variety.  The end result is asparagus that is incredibly sweet and very tender.

One of the spears grew a little large and started to lift the bucket.  This bent the largest spear and let in a little light, resulting in white asparagus with a tinge of colour.  

Not to worry, this was still very sweet and unlike anything you can buy from the shops.

If you grow asparagus give making some white asparagus a try.   Just put a bucket over the soil where the spears will emerge, and remember to check it every few days.

I only do a few spears per plant so as not to weaken the plants too much, but I am probably being overly cautious.  I am sure commercial farms make a lot more white asparagus per plant and have no problems.

Purple cauliflower

Last year we bought a purple cauliflower from the markets.  I am not a huge fan of cauliflower, but I liked that one.  It was a bit sweeter than normal cauliflower.

I have a general dislike of any of the cabbages, they are ok in small amounts, but in medium amounts I find them difficult to eat.  I didn't struggle eating the purple cauliflower as much as I struggle eating the white ones.

I decided to buy some cauliflower seeds and grow a few myself.  Strangely enough, it was really difficult to find seeds of purple cauliflower.  After a surprising amount of looking around I bought some cauliflower seeds.  I planted them in summer just before Christmas, and harvested them early spring.

One thing that surprised me was that they started out white, and gained purple colour once they matured.  The later we harvested them the more intense the purple colour.

Purple cauliflower

The leaves of the purple cauliflower plants were huge.  Some of the leaves had deep purple veins, others did not, there was a bit of genetic variation.  After harvesting the cauliflower I fed the large leaves to the chickens.  

We could have used the leaves like cabbage and eaten them ourselves, but our chickens loved eating the leaves so I think that was a better use of them.  There were a small number of snails and things on the leaves, which the chickens also ate.

Picked this one too early - they colour up as they mature

 

I grow everything organically, I don't even use the 'organic' poisons that are allowed on organic farms.  The first cauliflower looked nice, but when cut into pieces we found it was full of slugs and earwigs.  While they hadn't done any damage to the cauliflowers, they were hiding in them and it was really gross.

After that when I harvested a cauliflower I put the head in water for an hour.  That way anything that was living in it would flee in fear of drowning.  I am not sure how long was needed, all I know is an hour worked enough.

Something that all cabbages do is repel water.  When under water the few cauliflower leaves that I had not removed were covered in a thin film of air.  They shimmered and looked like silver.  My photos do not do them justice.

Even though there is that thin film of air this did not mean that any earwigs of slugs remained.  There was not enough air, so they all abandoned the cauliflower, meaning that the cauliflower was completely free of slugs etc.

Cauliflower leaves underwater look incredibly silvery in real life

I am not the best at growing any of the cabbage family.  I did ok with cauliflower, and will likely grow them again, but they will never be a main vegetable that I grow.  

Most of them grew massive, and others were tiny, I don't know if that was from growing conditions or genetics. 

Seeds of purple cauliflower are difficult to find at times.  If I save seed I will list any spare seed on my for sale page.

Breeding micro woolly tomatoes

I grow some varieties of micro tomatoes, the plants themselves reach about 10cm (4 inch) tall.  I also grow another variety of tomato with woolly leaf and black fruit.  So I decided to try and cross them and aim for a micro tomato plant with woolly foliage and blue/black fruit.

For a few years I keep meaning to cross the two, and things keep preventing this or I am not successful in making this cross or all my seedlings die.  Last year I attempted to make this cross again.

One of these seedlings is clearly different than the others

I am not great at cross pollinating tomatoes, my hands are less steady and my eyesight is not as keen as it once was, plus I sometimes emasculate flowers that are a little too old and have already shed some pollen.  

I decided to use Micro Tom as the seed parent.  Any self-pollinated seedlings would be micro dwarf, any F1 plants will be regular sized and have non-woolly foliage.  It should be easy to see within days of the seeds germinating if my cross had worked.

The three seedlings below were collected from Micro Tom.  Two are micro dwarf, and one is clearly larger.  This one is a result of my cross.

Micro Tom x Woolly Blue tomato F1

Once they grew a little larger this cross, between a dwarf and a micro-dwarf, is one of my largest tomato seedlings.  Hybrid vigour means the F1 grows well.

F1 hybrid vigour

The F1 plants will all be large plants, none will be micro dwarf.  I need to save a lot of seed from this F1 plant and grow as many seedlings as I can as the F2 is where I will start to see segregation.

The F2 plants will be a mix of large plants and micro dwarf, each of them will have a mix of regular leaf and woolly leaf, each of them will have a mix of different coloured fruit.  

Given the genes the parent stock had, there is a 1 in 256 chance of getting the plant I want from the F2.

Growing 256 plants does not guarantee what I am after, so I need to plant many hundreds of seeds.  I will be able to cull anything that is not micro dwarf at cotyledon stage.  I should then be able to cull anything that is not woolly at the first true leaf stage.  This will leave me with a more manageable number of plants to grow out to see if there are any high anthocyanin.  

To be honest, I am keen to grow out and stabilise any micro woolly lines even if they are not high anthocyanin as I think that micro woolly tomatoes sound like fun.  There may be some interesting things to come out of this cross.

The seed parent was Micro Tom, the smallest tomato plant in the world.

Micro Tom tomato under 4cm tall

Micro Tom tomatoes

The pollen parent has woolly foliage and high anthocyanin fruit.  It also has a few other interesting genes at play, so there is a lot of potential for interesting woolly foliage micro tomatoes.

Black fruited tomato

I don't have much else to say about these just yet as it is just a seedling.  Hopefully it flowers and fruits in season and I can save seeds.  

Stabilising micro dwarf tomatoes is a bit faster than normal tomatoes because I can usually get 2 or sometimes 3 generations per year out of them, while I can often only get one generation per year of larger tomatoes.

Burdock and salsify - obscure root vegetables

This year I grew some vegetables that I had never grown or eaten before.  Burdock (Arctium lappa) and salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius).  Although, now that I think about it I did find salsify growing as a roadside weed once, collected some seeds, grew some, and moved house before getting to eat any.

Budock and salsify are ancient root vegetables that are pretty rare here.  Only a few people seem to have heard of them, and they often talk highly about both of these vegetables.  So I thought I should grow some and taste them myself.

Both plants grew in similar conditions, I gave them full sun and a little water.  They grew over summer and died back over winter when we harvested them.  The salsify didn't die back completely, the burdock went from large impressively lush plants to nothing above soil in the blink of an eye.  Luckily I remembered where I planted them so I could dig up some roots to eat.

Burdock, Salsify, and Skirret

Burdock

The burdock grew rather large leaves that look similar to rhubarb.  The hottest days of summer scorched the leaves a bit, but it didn't seem to bother the plants too much. 

Burdock is said to be biennial, I am told it will flower and die next year.  I dug up some roots to eat, and replanted the stump to grow/flower over the warmer months.  I'm not sure if that is the best way to do things, but it seemed to make sense to me.

The roots were very long and went deep into the soil.  Most snapped off as I dug them and I didn't dig deep enough to get them all.  The yield per plant, had I dug up all the roots, probably would have been pretty decent for the amount of space they took.

Burdock plant - large leaves

Burdock in the garden

Salsify

Salsify grows as a roadside weed around here.  It has long strappy leaves.  I am told that it is perennial, but have a feeling it may be biennial too.  These easily handled summer heat, and seemed to cope with little water.

I expected the roots to grow long and fat like carrots, but all were thing and short and twisted.  I found the yield per plant to be disappointing, but that may have been my fault for not growing them properly.  They were very easy to grow, so a small yield isn't a deal breaker.

Salsify plant has strappy leaves

Harvest

I dug up some burdock and salsify during winter.  

I don't know the best way to cook them.  I tried some of each raw, that wasn't terrible but I won't be doing that again.

We washed the roots, cut them into small lengths, and roasted them.  We also roasted some skirret, pumpkin, and potatoes too.  I figured that would give us a good comparison of roasted root vegetables.  

The burdock, salsify, and skirret needed far less cooking time than the pumpkin and potato.

Burdock on left, salsify on right

 

The big fat things are the burdock crowns, you can see the growing point where the leaves will emerge from.  I removed the roots for cooking and replanted the crowns.  Hopefully they will grow and flower this year to produce seed.  I don't know if this is the right thing to do, but it made sense to me at the time.  Hopefully I haven't killed them.

I have never grown burdock before so this is all part of the learning curve.

Burdock crowns - roots removed before replanting

Burdock and Salsify Taste

Both burdock and salsify were simple to grow, burdock gave a decent yield and salsify a very small yield, but none of that matters compared to their taste.  I am glad we roasted them with other root vegetables as a comparison.

Out of all the vegetables I ate that evening I love the taste of skirret the most.  It is sweet and wholesome and delicious.  I rank potato and pumpkin next, they taste both good. 

Far behind them I would rank burdock as a distance fourth place in my preference.  I didn't hate it, but didn't particularly like it.  I would eat it again, but there are plenty of other things I would prefer to eat.

Salsify didn't taste great to me and I rank it as fifth.  I didn't hate it, but it sure didn't impress me.  To me it tasted kind of like carrot but without any sweetness.  Perhaps roasting is not the best way to cook salsify?

Maybe my expectations were too high, maybe I am becoming a food snob after eating all the other things I grow, maybe they taste ok but the other roasted veggies we had that night were all better so by comparison it was lacking, maybe these taste better if they were cooked in other ways, maybe other people love the taste and it just doesn't appeal to me, I really don't know.  If you get a chance to try burdock and salsify I still say give them a go.  Who knows, perhaps you will love them.

Dwarf Snake Bean

I have grown snake beans (Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis) in the past, green and red, but never a dwarf snake bean.  I had considered growing a dwarf variety, but had not bought any seeds.  It is difficult to justify the cost when I didn't need them.  Then someone kindly gave me some seeds of a dwarf snake bean.

These dwarf snake beans produced compact plants up to around a foot tall, each growing numerous long red bean pods.  I didn't get around to taking any photos until the pods were a little old.  

The pods didn't get quite as long as the snake beans I used to grow, but smaller plants were easier to fit into tight spaces, were a lot simpler to manage, and produced a really large crop.

I think the colour of the pods is pretty impressive, the yield was great, the flowers were pretty, and the plants did not take up much space.  

I saved plenty of seed and plan to grow these again.

I like the looks of these

Dwarf snake beans

Dwarf snake beans

Young snake beans are dark purple

Snake bean flowers