Purple Basil

As I've written about before, I grow my entire garden from seed rather than purchase the plants.  I do this for a few reasons but the most compelling is the ability to pick specific varietals that match my culinary tastes.  This year's choices include sauce and slicing tomatoes as well as eggplant, basil, parsley, cucumbers, beans, and both summer and winter squash.  Each year I find it really difficult to limit myself to only a few vegetables.  Overall, this year I think I did fairly well but I did splurge on a few items.

Of course I had to get sweet basil, what would summer be without bunches of fresh basil and homemade pesto? But after reading about the many different types of basil I splurged and got purple basil seeds.  They should make a very pretty pesto, although I'm not sure how they differ in taste - that's part of the fun of gardening - trying new things....

I was a bit forced into two types of Eggplant because last year our Eggplants did not do well and I really want Eggplants this year. I choose Dusky, a more or less standard eggplant, that I've had success with in the past.  The other one I choose is Fairytale; an elongated eggplant that is supposed to taste best at its baby stage.  Hopefully one of them will do well.

A little eggplant.

My last set of choices are squash and I admit I probably got too many squash with two varietals of both summer (a Zucchini and a scaloppini) and winter (butternut and buttercup) squash.  My thought was that the winter squash will store and I'll only plant one of each!  We'll see how that goes but I'm really excited about the squash.  I've never grown (nor cooked) scaloppini - little flying saucer shaped summer squash (if you have recipes let me know!).  Same with the buttercup.  Hopefully we'll like both and if I have too much I can always leave them on my neighbor’s doorsteps!