4 Really Cool Plants To Grow This Summer

Useful & unusual items for this summer's garden

Over the winter, I spend a great deal of time thinking about plants. During the summer, when they're actually growing, I don't so much think about them as deal with them. Winter is the time for research, game-planning, scheming. And this winter, I've cooked up some fun schemes.

While my garden will primarily feature the usual stuff--tomatoes, peppers, corn, squash, etc--it's important to always make room for oddities. And I've found some good ones.

Potatoes from true seed

"Seed potatoes" are small tubers that sprout shoots, eventually yielding a mess of tubers and a lot of above ground foliage. It's the normal way to grow potatoes. Like all root cuttings, they are clones of the parent plant, identical in every way.

Growing potatoes from true seed--the seeds found in the small berries formed by some potatoes after they flower--is much less common. Like all seeds, they're a genetic remix. With most plants, this isn't an issue because different cultivars are stabilized through breeding, allowing you to be fairly confident in what you're going to get from a seed.

Potatoes are trickier. True seeds will sometimes yield plants that don't set tubers at all, or that set them too late for a particular growing season, or that even set very bitter tubers that are kinda poisonous. So growing potatoes from true seed is a crap shoot.

Why take such a risk? Because the genetic diversity of this remarkable Andean plant is extreme, and thus the potential jackpots are really special. If you hit a home run and get really cool potatoes from a seedling, you can save the tubers to use as seed next year and get identical plants. Congrats, you've just bred a whole new type of potato! It can be given a name and propagated indefinitely. That's a pretty cool thing!

Here's where to get some.