Selected for success

Photo courtesy of PanAmerican Seed

There are more than 100 varieties in the PanAmerican Seed Vegetables collection, all selected, trialed and tested for attributes like flavor, disease resistance, earlier and longer harvests and high productivity. Breeders also prioritize novelty flavors and looks, like the award-winning, variegated Candy Cane Chocolate Cherry Pepper.

With such a robust assortment that continues to grow as the 78-year-old company introduces new innovations each year, the team saw a need to organize all the choices into simple categories, said Dylan Sedmak, vegetable portfolio manager at PanAmerican Seed.

“The direction we saw the market going in is that home gardeners have less space to work with than they did in the past, so having varieties that worked for smaller spaces is great,” Sedmak said. “But we also have a lot of varieties that work in larger spaces. So, let’s make it really easy for the grower to decide what variety is going to be best for them and their customers.”

Selecting the right home where a plant can thrive, whether it be a pepper, basil, tomato, eggplant or squash, often comes down to location, location, location.

To help customers be successful, they developed four categories that describe where each variety performs best — whether that be in a hanging basket, the patio, indoors in the kitchen or in the ground, and whether they fit best in a potted, basket or farm and garden vegetable growing program. Sedmak described each group and the plant traits common in each.

Produce Grower: The largest group of plants is within the Ground Breakers category. What kind of spaces work best for varieties that fall under this category?

Dylan Sedmak: These are our farm- and garden-performing all-stars, with great flavor and really good disease resistance. These are the no-nonsense varieties that are great in the ground, a little bit too big for containers, and what a fresh market farmer or someone selling finished produce would want to look at if they’re not limited in space vertically or horizontally. There are some awesome options with good disease resistance profiles, great yields and really nice flavors.

PG: What about growers and gardeners limited in space?

DS: “Compact” is thrown out a lot today, especially when it comes to vegetables. To me, “compact” is really going to be anything from 1 to 2 1/2 feet tall, and that’s where a lot of our varieties in the Patio Picks group fit. These are going to live inside the container throughout their entire life cycle. With Patio Picks, you’ve got something that makes consumers successful just because they’re much more manageable. From a breeding perspective, Patio Picks is leaning more toward determinate types. They’re big ideas for small spaces, and it’s a breeding statement that we specialize in this compact market.

PG: There are also two categories for varieties to perform in even smaller spaces. Can you share more about each?

DS: Basket Bites include varieties with more of a mounding, trailing habit that would be really good in a hanging basket. One of my favorites on the tomato side is Topsy Tom, which is a semi-determinate variety. It’s mounded but just trails right out of the basket, so you get this beautiful aesthetic while still enjoying loads of fruits. And we have a cucumber variety called Patio Snacker, which is a more compact cucumber vine.

Kitchen Minis™ is a collection of tabletop vegetables and herbs that are great for putting indoors on the windowsill. The grower could sell a finished plant with fruit starting to emerge. Our flagship varieties are 6 to 8 inches tall — you can put them in larger containers, and they are perfect for 6- to 8-inch containers.

PG: What new varieties are you adding in 2025?

DS: One that I’m absolutely in love with is our WonderStar™ beefsteak tomato. We just came out with Red this season, so growers can buy it now, and we’ve got another sister variety, Pink, that will come out in 2025. Both are prime examples of what we specialize in with our breeding programs at PanAmerican Seed.

It’s a determinate beefsteak tomato, which is quite rare. Beefsteaks are usually these large garden monsters and the last tomato to harvest in your garden. But with WonderStar, the fruiting cycle is a fixed time, so you can just get away with staking it rather than having to worry about caging it. We also selected it for earlier yield, with 60 to 65 days from transplant to harvest.