Endive Frisée is a type of chicory that has exploded onto gourmet plates. The exotic plant resembles a lettuce that has gone horribly awry. With a pale green explosion of frizzy leaves it adds a frisky note to green salads.

Frisée or chicorée frisée is French for curly chicory. It also is sometimes called Italian curly chicory or French curly chicory. Now, frisée is not exactly the same vegetable that comes to market as chicory, curly chicory, and curly endive, although it is exactly the same plant, Cichorium endivia.

Grown in, and named after a municipality in northern Italy near Turin. Suitable for both summer and autumn cultivation, it has curly and strongly lobed leaves and a creamy-white self-blanching heart.

With a very large head, long mid-green leaves and a self-bleaching, creamy-white interior, the fullness of the head facilitates tying up for more intense blanching.

Popularised in the 1990s, Frisée often appears in mesclun and other salad mixes, because the green is extremely laborious and expensive to produce as a sole salad ingredient. It is generally served in loose chunks in salad to highlight its exotic feathered appearance and a small amount can go a long way.

While it can have a slightly bitter flavour, frisée is much milder than other varieties of endive such as radicchio or Belgian endive. Tie up for a week before harvesting to blanch.

Cuor Di Albenga is an heirloom oxheart tomato from Albenga, Italy, known for its large, meaty, pleated, teardrop-shaped fruits that are typically red or orangey-red. It has a sweet and savory flavor that makes it excellent for both fresh use, such as in salads, and for cooking, especially roasting, sauces, and canning. These plants are indeterminate, vigorous, and productive. 

Origin: From the Ligurian coast town of Albenga in Northern Italy.

Shape: Large, pleated, teardrop or ox-heart shaped.

Size: Fruits are large, often weighing 10–16 ounces (about 200–300g).

Color: Ranges from pinkish to red or orangey-red.

Flesh: Meaty with few seeds and little juice, with a firm and sweet pulp.

Growth: Indeterminate, vigorous, and productive plants that require staking or caging. 

Fresh: Excellent sliced and eaten raw in salads, or used in Caprese salads.

Sauces: Ideal for homemade sauces, pasta dishes, and stews due to its rich, meaty flesh.

Roasting: Roasting brings out its savory richness.

Other: Also suitable for canning and making fresh juice. 

Slender fruit is bright sweet golden-yellow. They are as delicious as they are attractive; bush plants.

Summer Squash - a broad term used to describe soft squash varieties such as zucchini and patty pan squash—is a warm-season crop that can be grown almost anywhere in full sun. Wait until any threat of frost has passed and the soil has warmed to about 70 F before planting, as these tender squash varieties are extremely sensitive to frost and light freezes. Perfect for containers, most summer squash grow on short, compact vines that don’t require trellising or staking, unlike the sprawling vines of most winter squash and pumpkins. Rather than growing baseball bat-sized zucchini—which can be bland, full of seeds, and woody—harvest squash when fruit is small and tender and your plants will keep producing right up to frost.

Packet: 9-10 grams of seed

Thai Basil. A member of the mint family, thai basil is sweet in taste but also charming to the eye - making it a garden favourite. 

It has a liquorice flavor for stirfry, soups and salads. 

A favorite squash of Sicilians, cucuzza squash, meaning ‘super long squash,’ is gaining some popularity in North America. Never heard of cucuzza squash plants? 

Also known under a wide range of other names such as Zucchetta Cucuzzi, Serpent of Sicily, Italian Edible Gourd, Longissima, Bottle Gourd, Calabash, Suzza Melon, Zucca, Tasmania Bean, Guinea Bean, New Guinea Bean, White Flowered Gourd and Indian Squash, is a vine is an annual plant with hairy, shallow lobed leaves and white flowers (unlike squash which are always yellow flowered). The vines can run up to 25 feet in length.

Cucuzza is a summer squash in the botanical family of Lagenaria, which boasts a plethora of other varieties. This edible squash is related to the calabash, also known as water gourd or bird’s nest gourd. A vigorous squash, fruit is born from vines that can grow two feet (0.5 m.) a day. The fruits are straight, green gourds, occasionally with a minor curve to them. The skin is dark green and medium hard. The fruit itself can grow 10 inches (25 cm.) per day and will be 18 inches to 2 feet (45-60 cm.) long. The squash is usually peeled and the seeds removed from the larger fruit. The squash can be cooked just like any other summer squash – grilled, stewed, fried, stuffed, or roasted. Intrigued? I bet you’re wondering how to grow cucuzza squash now.

This "beauty heart" type Chinese radish is the most popular variety grown in the middle and northern parts of China. It is also call watermelon radish. This variety is globe-shape, green shoulder with dark pink flesh. Because of their color, they are the perfect radishes to carve into flower shapes as garnish. It has a crisp texture and is mild and sweet flavored. Try eating fresh. Just thinly slice, top with fresh squeezed lime and a little salt and pepper or with sugar. For fall season sowing only.

Chinese celery is an aromatic plant with a strong, peppery flavor, thin, hollow, crisp stems, and delicate leaves. It is smaller than Western celery and is often used in soups, stir-fries, and other dishes for its potent taste, which becomes milder when cooked. Also known as kintsai or leaf celery, it is commonly used in Asian cuisines. 

Appearance: It features long, narrow, hollow stems that can be white to dark green, or even pink depending on the variety. The leaves are delicate and wispy.

Flavor: It has a pungent and peppery flavor that is more intense than standard celery. The taste softens and sweetens when cooked.

Usage: It is rarely eaten raw and is primarily used for flavoring in cooked dishes. It is excellent in stir-fries, soups, and fried rice. Both the stems and leaves are edible.

Growing: Chinese celery is often easier to grow than its Western counterparts and can be cultivated in smaller spaces like pots. It is typically grown as an annual, though it is technically a biennial. 

Kintsai Chinese Yellow Stem Celery, Boly, Cutting Celery, Nan Ling, Gin Cai, Kun Choy, Kan Tsoi

Round Zucchini have been popular in Europe for years. The Italians have their dark green Tondo di Piacenza, the French have the light green speckled Ronde de Nice, the Dutch have the "Roly Poly" (a loose translation from Burpee's marketers) and the British have their single serve striped marrow, Tender and True. There is even chinese produced seed of an almost white round zucchini. The common thread is that these zucchini are actually rather nice; solid, nutty, sweet, and as a bonus they are extremely early producers and are prolific if you keep harvesting the fruit. The compact plants are real workhorses of efficiency. They laughed at the limited nutrients and water of our sand lot trials!

These round zucchini from the above plants have matured to form a tough pumpkin-like or gourd-like rind. You must leave them on the plant until their colors have changed and they develop that hard skin. It takes several weeks beyond the immature stage that we usually consume summer squash at for the squash to mature. These are on the porch where they will "after ripen", for an additional month. The after ripening gives the seeds an extra amount of time to gain food reserves which will allow for healthier, more vigorous seedlings and better germination. Then they will be split with a sledge hammer (yes, the can be tough), seeds will be scooped out, washed in a mild soap solution and thoroughly dried to the "breaking" stage before storage. We used to spread out the seed on newspaper to dry but now we use drying screens which provide better air circulation.

Packet: 9-10 grams of seed