This year, there are more reasons than ever to grow your own tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and broccoli. It's a banner year for the introduction of new varieties -- now is a great time to make room for vegetables in your garden, or in a couple of big pots on a patio or balcony.

Vegetable gardeners at every level of experience are looking for two things, says Rob Johnston, the founder of Johnny's Selected Seeds in Albion, Maine. "They want a combination of easy-to-grow and real flavorful results," he says. "They are going to the trouble of having a garden, and they want the result to be something special."

Johnston is a judge for All-America Selections (AAS), which conducts trials of new vegetable and flower introductions at public, professional and university gardens across the country to identify breeders' best work every year. Last year, 28 trial gardens across the country participated in tests of new vegetable varieties. Johnston's credentials are solid -- he has been growing and breeding vegetables for 42 years. Johnny's has introduced more than 60 different vegetable varieties, including the colorful and delicious Bright Lights Swiss chard and, this year, a sweet little butternut squash called Butterscotch. They're both AAS winners.

This year is a banner year for AAS: 25 new vegetable, herb and flower varieties are 2015 award winners, more than any year since 1939. Most of the introductions are vegetables and herbs, and some are the very first winners in their class: This is the first time Brussels sprouts, bok choy, garlic chives and oregano have received AAS recognition.

Gardeners flipping through the catalogs and websites of seed specialists aren't just scouting around for another delicious tomato or cucumber, says Diane Blazek, director of All-America Selections. They want compact plants and heat and drought tolerance, and they're looking for vegetables pretty enough to grow in a flower garden. Vegetable gardeners love beautiful blooms, too, she says, and especially flowers that attract pollinators to their vegetable crops.

The gardeners who plant 40-foot rows of beans or pepper plants are still out there, Blazek says, but breeders have developed squash, cucumbers, beans and many other crops that flourish and produce an impressive harvest in small spaces -- such as Mascotte beans, which are just the right size for a window box, or Patio Baby eggplant, perfect for pots.

"More and more people are growing in containers," Blazek says. "They don't have huge gardens, and they're looking for vegetables that don't take up quite as much room."

Gardeners are also looking for novelty, says Jessie Liebenguth, a horticulturist at Reiman Gardens at Iowa State University and an AAS trial-garden judge. "People want vegetables that they may not be super familiar with, but that are new and fun," she says.

Liebenguth, who has been growing vegetables since she was a child, admits she was surprised when she opened her first box of seeds for an AAS trial season, three years ago. "My jaw dropped, there were so many entries," she says. "People are working hard to develop new, exciting things -- it's encouraging."

The new AAS broccoli winner, Artwork, is grown for its prolific production of side shoots, which increases the yield to weeks instead of just a one-chop harvest. Bopak, the new AAS award-winning bok choy, is great for gardeners interested in a quick crop and in cultivating in flowerpots. It grows to about 2 feet tall and would look great as the centerpiece of a big pot, surrounded by trailing flowers or low-growing herbs.

Liebenguth recommends peppers of various kinds for first-time gardeners looking for an easy crop. Cucumbers and cherry tomatoes are also encouraging crops for novices, she says, because the harvest is impressive and the taste can't be beat.

If you haven't grown vegetables before, start small, she suggests. "Wade in, try a couple of herbs, make a bruschetta garden or a salsa garden." Try mixing vegetables into a flower garden, Liebenguth says, "so it's not one huge, overwhelming space. You can walk along and enjoy your flowers, and you get a snack at the end."

It takes about 10 years to bring a new vegetable to market, Johnston says, but waiting for the next big thing isn't really necessary. With so many great new vegetable varieties already out there, you can scarcely go wrong. And, of course, the best vegetables you'll ever eat are the ones you grow yourself.

SIDEBAR

TOP CROPS

AAS: Since 1932, All-America Selections has recognized top new flower and vegetable varieties. Many of the 270 AAS vegetable winners over the years have become classics: The Celebrity tomato won in 1984 and remains very popular today. Waltham Butternut squash, a 1970 winner, is still one of the best-performing, most disease-resistant and delicious of the butternut squashes.

This year, there are 25 AAS winners, including 17 vegetables and three herbs. Some choice winners include:

-- Avalanche beets, a sweet, mild white beet with edible tops (like all beets). White beets will not turn your fingers red when you prepare them.

-- Artwork broccoli, grown for its prolific production of side shoots.

-- Bossa Nova zucchini, with a pretty, mottled two-tone fruit. It matures early and produces for weeks.

-- Hestia Brussels sprouts, which are particularly cold-tolerant. They're great for a fall garden because the flavor improves after a light frost.

For a complete list of AAS winners and more information, go to all-americaselections.org.

Johnny's Selected Seeds: Johnny's was founded by Rob Johnston in 1973 and has introduced more than 60 vegetable varieties. Johnny's Seeds is one of the top choices for market gardeners, but the company sells seeds and supplies in small quantities for home gardeners, too. Several of the company's introductions are AAS winners. Johnston particularly recommends:

-- Clementine orange cocktail-sized tomatoes. They're a little bigger than cherry tomatoes, with a great flavor and color.

-- Bright Lights Swiss chard, for its delicious taste and colorful stems. Chard is beautiful and easy to grow. Bright Lights is an AAS winner.

-- Butterscotch butternut squash, a 2015 AAS winner. Compact plants produce small fruits, just right for two servings.

-- Salanova lettuce produces a large head that breaks easily into individual leaves, like baby-leaf salad greens but with more flavor and a better texture, since the lettuce is mature.

For more information, go to johnnyseeds.com.

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An invisible hand is at work in successful naturalistic landscapes. Nature gets all the credit in the eyes of the beholder, but there's plenty of hard work behind the scenes.

That human hand -- well-concealed -- shapes visitors' experience of Fallingwater, the magnificent home in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s as a weekend retreat for Edgar Kaufmann and his family. The home and property are now managed by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. Every year, thousands of people come to see the house, an architectural gem poised like an ark precariously at rest over dramatic waterfalls in a stretch of Bear Run. The home itself is a marvel, and the meticulously managed landscape offers many lessons that gardeners and designers can take home with them and put into practice in their own backyards.

Fallingwater's landscape is "not designed; it is enhanced," says the director of Fallingwater, Lynda Waggoner, who first came to the property as a tour guide when she was a high school student 50 years ago. It looks natural, but nature had plenty of help: Views are carefully framed, and the palette is tightly controlled. At Fallingwater, the context is spectacular, but even in a city garden or on a suburban plot, views can be framed, shaped, blocked out and improved with plantings. Identifying the prospects within and around a garden and taking proper advantage of them is something of an art: These perspectives, exposures, sudden revelations and subtle concealments are fundamental parts of the context of your home.

In the Kaufmanns' day, the woods around Fallingwater were manicured by numerous gardeners. Today, with a significantly smaller staff, the look is less controlled but perhaps more exciting. "We promote the richness of the native landscape," Waggoner says. The lines and layers of trees and shrubs seem part of the home, "a seamless experience between inside and outside," Waggoner says. The plant selection and the plant palette are skillfully edited to bring visitors close to nature without feeling overawed by it. "The wildness is just kept at bay," she says.

Home gardens can capture this same sense of the harmony between a structure and its surroundings. Neighborhood trees are a great gift to a gardener, and plantings can be arranged to take advantage of the striking backdrops they provide, changing constantly through the seasons. When you study your landscape and frame the views, both from your windows and from the outside approaching your home, you're working on what Edgar Kaufmann Jr. described as one of the great successes of Fallingwater, bringing "people and nature together in an easy relationship."

Frank Lloyd Wright, who grew up in Wisconsin and is well-known for his interpretations of prairie style, found nature rejuvenating, says Rick Darke, an author and garden designer who takes a special interest in the interactions between culture and horticulture. "The house is in sync with the forest with each step, in every passage, in every season," he says. At Fallingwater, there are no traditional flower beds, but the outdoor spaces, Darke says, are nevertheless "carefully choreographed." Quite a dance can be staged, even in a small urban garden. The key is to get the eye and the feet moving through the setting.

Wright celebrated seasonal changes and provided opportunities to experience them from different vantage points -- ranging from a terrace outside a bedroom to what Waggoner calls the "bug's-eye view" of plants along a stairway to the guesthouse, up the hill from the main house at Fallingwater. Changes of level, even just a few steps up or down, affect the mood of a space: You may step up onto a porch with a sense of arrival, or step a short way down into an intimate little patio sheltered by close-by plantings.

Kary Arimoto-Mercer, a landscape architect who wrote her master's thesis on Fallingwater, compares the landscape to New York's Central Park, where Frederick Law Olmsted's design also evokes nature but controls it carefully. "Many visitors tend to believe the site evolved on its own," she says, that "nature took over and, in its godly way, made everything beautiful." As she researched her thesis, she says, "I came to realize that Fallingwater's landscape was and is as much a construction as the house itself."

So you can strike out for the wilderness, or you can get to work in your own backyard. Even on a city lot, nature is all around: Construct yourself a garden that embraces your house and draws you outside into your own natural little piece of the environment.

Source

-- Fallingwater is open for guided tours from March through December. Advance ticket purchases are required; see www.fallingwater.org.

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There's a reason why farmers -- not gardeners -- are the great producers of wheat, oats, barley, and other major grains: These are challenging crops to manage. But other interesting and beautiful grains are easy to grow in your own backyard, and they put dash and drama in among the daisies.

Growing ornamental grains is richly rewarding. Easy garden grains, such as millet and amaranth, are striking plants by themselves, and they are terrific in combination with annual and perennial flowers and shrubs.

Garden designers love grains for their brashness: They tend to stand up tall in a garden, making them a great choice for the back of a flower bed or the center of a bed you can see from all sides. Tall varieties of millet and amaranth -- sun-loving annuals that are easy to grow from seed -- will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with canna lilies or tall sunflowers. The dark foliage of Purple Majesty millet, which grows up to five feet tall in the garden, makes a striking backdrop for smaller summer flowers, and its dramatic flower spikes, which resemble cattails, are as handsome in flower arrangements as they are in the garden.

Purple Majesty comes straight off the farm: It was discovered in the course of a breeding program for forage grains at the University of Nebraska. The breeder's background and the majority of his work "is feeding the world, not providing ornamental flowers," says Mary O'Connor, a product manager for Pan American Seed who now works with the university's experts on ornamental millet. The instant popularity of Purple Majesty led to the introduction of shorter ornamental millets and to a greater range of colors, O'Connor says. Jester grows to only 3 feet tall; another small millet, Jade Princess, is only about 2 feet tall and has dense purple flower spikes that stand out against chartreuse foliage.

Ornamental grains of all kinds have especially caught on with flower farmers, who supply bouquets by the bucketful for farmers' markets and have a growing influence with florists and event planners. "Demand for ornamental grains -- and grasses -- is strong in the floral design world," says Debra Prinzing, author of "The 50-Mile Bouquet" and "Slow Flowers," which both feature the specialty blooms of flower farmers around the country. Ornamental grains are "not really a product that the huge South American exporters take the time to grow," Prinzing says, and consequently, U.S. flower farmers have turned several ornamental grains into top sellers. Prinzing calls ornamental grains "the couture category of specialty floral."

Diane Szukovathy, owner of Jello Mold Farm in Mount Vernon, Washington, grows about 150 different cut-flower varieties on her 7-acre farm, including half an acre planted with 10 different kinds of amaranth, another traditional farm crop that is worthy of a spot in the garden and easy to grow. "We are botanical freaks," Szukovathy says, explaining her interest in ornamental grains. She has also experimented with wheats -- especially a showy variety called Silver Tips -- and has grown orach, sorghum, quinoa and millet, as well.

Cut-flower trends are always changing, Szukovathy says, but the wildflower look is a perennial favorite with brides for bouquets and wedding decorations. Ornamental grains fit nicely into the niche, she says: They give bouquets and centerpieces an earthy sophistication.

Amaranth has been grown as an ornamental for generations. It is "an old-timey garden plant; it touches the heartstrings of a lot of people," says Mary Garcia, a spokesperson for Swallowtail Garden Seeds, a mail-order seed company that offers 10 different kinds of amaranth seeds. The old-fashioned amaranth called Love-Lies-Bleeding is one of the showiest, and it's easy to grow in the garden or in pots.

One of the most popular amaranth varieties is Hot Biscuits, a tall plant with tawny-gold seed heads in fall. The heavy seed clusters are dramatic in a garden and gorgeous in a bouquet. Last year, the lifestyle and garden shop Terrain in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, gave Hot Biscuits a prominent spot in a flower bed featuring orange, crimson and gold flowers, foliage, and seed heads.

If you're interested in cultivating a crop of wheat, barley or oats for bouquets, the best place to plant them might be in a row in the vegetable garden, where you can give them the special care they need. But go ahead and make room for millet and amaranth varieties in flower beds or in a big pot. They'll sparkle in the garden and turn bouquets into works of art.

SOURCES

Millet and amaranth are both easy to grow from seed or from transplants available at garden shops. Plant them in well-drained soil in a sunny spot. Tall varieties may need protection from wind. Find seeds here:

-- Swallowtail Garden Seeds, swallowtailgardenseeds.com

-- Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, rareseeds.com

In "Slow Flowers" (St. Lynn's Press, $17) Debra Prinzing, debraprinzing.com, shows how to use fresh flowers from local growers to make bouquets all year long. In her fall arrangements, she makes the most of the grace and beauty of ornamental grains. The website slowflowers.com will help you find fresh, locally grown flowers no matter where you live.

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