What fruit and vegetable varieties taste best grown in Wisconsin?
Coming up with vegetables that please two important groups — Wisconsin farmers and local chefs — is the goal of the University of Wisconsin’s Seed to Kitchen Collaborative. ● It’s all about creating delicious varieties of vegetables well-adapted to the Upper Midwest, explains UW-Madison associate professor of horticulture Julie Dawson, who leads the ongoing research project. ● The hope, said Dawson, “is that farmers have better options for varieties that produce really good flavor in the Wisconsin climate. And that chefs have more access to those types of varieties. So, we’re trying to breed for flavor but also to breed for production traits.”
In a typical year, 12 crops are in trials — that is, test grown — with 20 to 30 varieties of each crop. About 250 to 300 trials are by farmers and the same number by gardeners. Farmers and gardeners often grow more than one kind of crop.
While many vegetable varieties have been bred for characteristics such as disease resistance or durability during transport — think supermarket tomatoes — the focus here is on top-quality vegetables for Wisconsin farmers who sell directly to restaurants, farmers markets and grocery stores.
It’s a group effort connecting plant breeders who focus on flavor and organic growing to farmers, home gardeners and chefs, she said.
From breeders to growers to chefs
The way it works is that plant breeders from UW-Madison, as well as independent breeders and seed companies from across the country, contribute the varieties to be auditioned each growing season. Among the crops in the lineup are beets, carrots, lettuce, potatoes, sweet corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, basil and winter squash.
Many are new or soon-to-be released varieties, developed by crossing two parents, but some heirlooms are also part of the trials. Each year the trials, which are entering their eighth season, take place at the UW research stations, one west of Madison and the other in Spooner, in far northwestern Wisconsin.
Farmers and home gardeners grow the vegetables of most interest to them. The vegetables — and sometimes fruits such as cider apples — are evaluated for characteristics such as appearance, fresh-market quality, disease resistance, earliness, yield and above all for flavor.
Before the COVID-19 restrictions, about a dozen chefs, most from Madison, would sample the vegetables in monthly blind tastings. In addition, the chefs would let breeders know which flavors, colors and textures interest them.
This past year, COVID-19 curtailed the tastings and limited some of the trials. Looking ahead, Dawson expects research station trials still will be limited this summer, but farm and garden trials will go on as usual. Also, she hopes limited tastings with chefs will be possible later in the season.
Signup for farmers and gardeners for the 2021 trials is going on through March 1 at seedtokitchen.horticulture.wisc.edu
At that link, you'll also find trial results and names of participating breeders, seed companies and chefs.
A quest for the best flavor
The following interview with Julie Dawson has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: You and Madison chef Tory Miller and UW-Madison horticulture professor Irwin Goldman got things rolling. How did the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative begin?
Answer: In 2013, Irwin Goldman, Tory Miller and I went to a conference in New York at the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture that brought together chefs and plant breeders from all over the country. The idea was, why don't we think about breeding for flavor so that chefs can source varieties locally, rather than trying to find an heirloom from, say, Italy, or some kind of harder-togrow, harder-to-get variety that has a particular flavor they were looking for.
And so, we thought why not breed varieties that had that kind of flavor right here in Madison? Madison is a really good place to do that kind of work because we have a good plant breeding program. We have the largest vegetable breeding group in the country. And we have a local food scene with lots of farmers, as well as chefs eager to source local foods.
Q: The Seed to Kitchen Collaborative is geared locally, to the directmarket business. Can you talk a little more about that?
A: It's farmers who are selling directly to consumers or to restaurants or local grocery stores. The direct-to-consumer market includes farmers markets, CSAs and roadside stands. And direct-wholesale — and wholesale is a catch-all term — but that includes restaurant sales, local co-ops, local groceries — so, selling to a business.
But the main thing is that the farm name usually stays with the produce. And so they gain customers by providing really high-quality produce.
Q: Why not just grow the vegetables at the university research stations? Why have trials on farms, as well?
A: I think one of the goals is to really build a network of farmers that are doing on-farm trials and collaborating with researchers and chefs, so that we are able to get information from a very decentralized network of trials.
As the climate changes, I think that the research stations, while they're still important, are going to be less representative of all the farms we need to serve. Having a network of a large number of farmers and gardeners who are doing trials gives us more relevant data on the varieties — and that helps farmers make better choices.
Q: Is all the produce grown organically?
A: The research station trials are organic, and a lot of the farmers are using organic practices as well as the gardeners, but there's no requirement for them to be organic, and we have a range of farmers that participate.
Q: What about heirloom varieties? Good flavor, but finicky?
A: There are certainly some heirlooms that have really good characteristics — and heirlooms almost by definition are varieties that we've kept around because they have qualities that we want. So, the heirlooms that are still grown usually have good flavor.
But we have found heirlooms from other regions that really don't perform well in our region — and they don't have good flavor because they aren't well adapted, so it's not true that all heirlooms have good flavor and modern varieties don't … we've found a lot of modern varieties where the breeder was interested in flavor, and they have excellent flavor in our climate.
So, you really can't make any claims about heirlooms versus modern varieties, at this point, at least the ones in our trials. We work with Seed Savers Exchange and they send us heirlooms each year from their collection that they think farmers and gardeners might be interested in. And there are certainly heirlooms that have good production and excellent flavor — and are still good to grow today.
Q: For gardeners who are interested in signing up, what’s required in terms of space and gardening experience?
A: It's better if it's not the first time they're growing the crops. They'll be more comfortable providing evaluations if they've grown the crop a few times . ...
The space requirement depends on the crop. For something like carrots, you can get three varieties and you have to plant a meter of each, that's not very much space. Whereas for tomatoes, if you need to plant nine tomatoes, that's quite a bit more space because you'll have three varieties and you'll want to plant three to five plants of each of them.
But it's quite flexible; people can choose a crop that fits in their space.
Q: Are you hoping to work with more Milwaukee-area chefs?
A: Yes, we'd love to work with more Milwaukee chefs. We have worked with a few chefs in the Milwaukee area. And we usually have one tasting event a year there. I'd like to build more of a network around Milwaukee, Eau Claire and Wausau, so we could have more chefs involved in assessing.
The only reason we haven't done it more frequently is that we grow the vegetables in west Madison, and it's difficult logistically to get the whole thing set up.
Q: What happens when a vegetable stands out in the trials? Does it mean that the varietal then comes to market and is available in seed catalogs?
A: Sure, there are a few where I wouldn't say (the collaborative) made it possible for them to have a market when they wouldn't have otherwise, but I think we contributed to the awareness of that variety and sped up the market development.
One example that comes to mind is a pepper. The parents were bred by Jim Nienhuis, who is a breeder here at UWMadison. He's a professor of horticulture — he's really into hot peppers. He bred the parent lines for a hybrid pepper that PanAmerican Seed has commercialized, called Aji Rico. It's extremely well-adapted to Wisconsin and also has good flavor, based on what the chefs evaluated.
One of the chefs has contracted with local farmers to grow it for his restaurants, and there are a number of other farms growing that variety. That one is commercialized and is available in a number of seed catalogs.
Anne Schamberg, a freelance writer, has tested seeds for the collaborative over the last three years. A couple of the most delicious vegetables in her trials have been Damsel tomato and Adana carrot.