I just finished my annual trip to the California Spring Trials, a week-long event wherein plant breeders introduce their new plants for the next year. It’s mainly bedding plants and flowers, but a few companies have some deep experience in vegetables like beets and peppers.

One such company is Sakata. Sakata is a Japanese company that has been producing and selling commercial vegetable seed for well over 100 years. I think maybe 180 years!

Sakata has been in commercial vegetables for a long time. They sell large volumes of seeds that have great commercial growing characteristics. Sometimes these commercial varieties also do well at the home consumer level. This makes them a great addition to your backyard vegetable garden. Small fruits and plants but high yield, upright habits, quick grow times, and most of all great taste. All of it is good for the home gardeners.

Sakata Vegetable Varieties

Sakata had a few varieties that will be great for home growing:

Fresh Start Beets are a beetless beet variety. It’s meant to be grown for its leaves, not its underground beet, so they’ve selected for a plant that grows a very insignificant beet. The leaves are meant to be harvested for inclusion in a “baby greens” type salad. The crop is ready to harvest after 30 days, but if left in the ground longer they really won’t get much bigger and will stay succulent rather than developing a thicker and bigger leaf.

Midas pepper is a lamuyo, otherwise known as a half-long pepper. A sweet pepper that looks like a spicy pepper, this variety has a smooth, thick wall with a crunchy texture. It produces all season, and oh! It’s gold!

Takara is a shishito-type pepper. Those are the kind that small and great if blistered in a bit of oil and tossed with salt—a traditional Japanese snack (Spanish, too). It has a compact habit, short internodes and high yields—all great things for the small-space gardener.

Now, these pepper varieties may or may not appear in your garden center as seed packets, but they have a better chance of ending up on the garden center bench as young transplants. The beets should be grown from seed and fed. Transplanting anything with a tap root (carrots, turnips, etc.) usually ends up not working well.

Sakata and a few other companies I saw this week had additional varieties, and I’ll tell you about those in the coming weeks.