Episode Details

In this week’s podcast, Diane Blazek, Executive Director of All America Selections (AAS), tells us about the upcoming 2026 gardening season’s latest award-winning plants. We highlight standout varieties like the Bada Bing tomato, Treviso basil, Majesty purple pole bean, and RubyBor kale, each recognized for their adaptability and exceptional qualities. Diane also introduces the Butter Lamp winter squash and Sun Globe coreopsis for ornamental gardens, and shares tips on plant care and spacing. Visit aaswinners.com for a complete list of top varieties and inspiration for your 2026 garden!

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For those of us who prefer to read instead of listen, here’s the human-corrected transcript of today’s podcast (with pictures):

Farmer Fred:

[0:00] So by now, you’re probably looking at gardening catalogs, or scrolling online, trying to figure out what are you going to plant in 2026 among vegetables or flowers. One good place to start is with All America Selections to figure out… what are the winners? What are the good ones? All America Selections is an independent nonprofit organization that tests new, never before sold varieties for the home gardener. There’s a whole season of anonymous trialing that goes on by volunteer horticultural professionals, and only the top garden performers are giving the AAS winner award designation for their superior performance. And all the AAS proceeds go into conducting the trials and promoting AAS winners, both old and new. And there’s a lot of old AAS winners. This is an organization that goes back decades. Here to tell us more is Diane Blazek, the executive director of All America Selections. And golly, it’s getting close to 100 years of AAS winners, Diane.

Diane Blazek:

[1:05] Yes, it is. We were founded in 1932, so it’s not too much longer. We’ll be celebrating our century.

Farmer Fred:

[1:13] And it has expanded, I guess, to include a lot of other types of winners, like regional winners and gold medal winners.

Diane Blazek:

[1:21] Yes. So when the organization was founded, everything was grown from seed and it really was just annuals and edibles. So what we’ve done now is not only expanded from seed, but we also include vegetatively propagated annuals and perennials. And we also now have regional winners, as you mentioned. And what that means is if we get an entry in and it has some very specific regional benefits, when we look at the scores, we notice that it didn’t do well all over North America, but it did well in the Southeast or the Northeast or the Southwest. And that’s how we determine regional winners.

Farmer Fred:

[2:01] And you also have a category called gold medal winners, but there aren’t too many of those, are there?

Diane Blazek:

[2:08] No, no. There were way back in the beginnings in the 1930s and 40s, because that was considered, it had to be a breeding breakthrough, like just light years ahead of everything else that was being trialed or the comparisons. So we had quite a few in the beginning, and then we went through a lull. There was about 15 years we didn’t have any gold medal winners. And then just recently, we’ve started to have a few more, and we do have two to talk about today. So I will wait until we introduce those. Yes, there are two in this batch of AAS winners.

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