Sunday, July 20, 2008

Varieties of Vegetables

Cornell has an interesting webpage on varieties of crops. It does a better job than anywhere on the internet of obtaining useful information about different garden plants. It really threw into perspective just how many different varieties of plant we have domesticated. For example there are more than three hundred varieties of lettuce, Seven hundred varieties of tomatoes,Four Hundred varieties of melons, Four hundred varieties of bean, Two hundred varieties of cucumber, Seventy varieties of spinach, One hundred varieties of eggplant, and fifty varieties of cauliflower. Seeds belonging to any of these many varieties of plants can be shipped to me from any number of internet companies, meaning that on my little garden I have at least a thousand reasonable options for types of seeds to plant.

What is even more impressive to me is within a few minutes of going to their page I found several varieties they had missed. This list of thousands of plants isn't even close to complete.

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