An Update from our trial field

providing more options for your farm

October is here, which means we are wrapping up some of our late summer and early fall trial evaluations. Despite what a crazy year 2020 has been, we have continued to push our vegetable evaluations so we can bring only the best varieties to the Osborne catalog! In all of our trials, we include some of our favorite tried-and-true varieties as checks. If we can beat those, we know we have something worth offering to our customers.

tomatoes

Our indoor and outdoor tomato plants were a lot of fun to evaluate this year. We have been particularly looking for high-performing hybrid heirlooms, and there will be a few new surprises featured in our catalog this year. Some of the characteristics we evaluated include disease resistance (especially to blight), fruit set, fruit size uniformity, plant cover, internode length, and blossom end scar (especially for the heirlooms).

spinach

The fall spinach trial is just wrapping up as well. We were looking at both baby and bunching varieties, and we checked on bolting dates as well to make sure we offer the best varieties for each seasonal slot. For spinach, we were particularly interested in finding varieties with uniform leaf size and shape, good leaf pliability and thickness, nice color and gloss, and of course the days to maturity were also important. 

pumpkins

We also had a pumpkin and squash trial that included 155 varieties! This was a bit of a bear to evaluate, but we are trying to expand our offerings along all classes, so we looked at carvers, ornamentals, pie pumpkins, winter squashes, and gourds. For this trial, some of the characteristics we evaluated included days to maturity, fruit shape and size uniformity, external color, average weight per fruit, the number of fruits per plant, and the strength of the handle.