Best Raise Me Up Vegetables in 2026

If you had an expensive greenhouse, you couldn't get better insulation or more effective protection for your young plants than with simple, economical Kozy Coats!

These UV-resistant plastic jackets fit around the plant, and when you fill their 18 hollow tubes with water, they are warmed by the sun, releasing much-needed heat to your plant while keeping it safe from spring winds, rains, and unseasonable frost!

Just imagine -- you no longer need live in fear of the weather report, but can set your tomatoes, peppers, and flowering plants out weeks earlier, each protected by its own Kozy Coat! The red tint of the plastic produces stockier plants sooner than ever before, without chemicals or expensive soil amendments!

Radishes are coming into their own at last on American tables, and that's great news for gardeners! No vegetable is quicker to grow, and with easy-to-sow seed tape, you can sow straight rows and pretty designs in seconds in the vegetable patch or parterre! This mix contains 3 different varieties you will love!

Here's more about each type of radish in this collection: Starburst - 60 days. A Chinese variety with roots as big as tangerines and as bright red (within the creamy white skin) as watermelons! Great for pickling as well as fresh eating, they reach 2 to 2 in diameter, maturing slowly.

French Breakfast - 27 days. A unique carrot-like shape and rosy-pink color accented with a white tip! Gourmet mild-tasting, sweet, crisp bite. Matures very early and demonstrates thick, lush foliage. Roxanne 27 days. AAS Winner. Charming little round 1-inch fruits are ready to eat in less than 3 weeks, but will hold a long time with no loss of flavor! Adaptable to a huge range of climates, this is the tastiest and most gardenworthy radish yet!

Days to Maturity: 75 from direct sow For more than 125 years, gardeners have been growing Basil Lettuce Leaf. It's simply the most productive variety, with giant leaves on bushy, vigorous plants. The aroma is enticing, and the flavor is more sweet than spicy, a gentle mild bite that the whole family will love. You're going to love this popular favorite!

Basil Lettuce Leaf earns its name with big, slightly serrated and crinkled leaves up to 4 inches wide and 6 inches long. Very closely set on well-branched plants 18 to 24 inches high, they keep coming all season—just pinch off the flower buds as they form, and Lettuce Leaf will keep growing more foliage.

About those flowers, though—Lettuce Leaf is slow to bolt, so you'll get a longer season of harvest. And as you pinch off the blooms, save them—they make delicious additions to salads and yummy garnish for the plate.

Now you can grow baby Romaine that matures quickly yet has all the flavor and texture associated with full sized varieties.

This seed packet contains equal parts Truchas and Breen, two superior varieties for space-saving, quick-crop delectability.

Truchas: is an upright Romaine with crimson leaves. Just 6 to 8 inches at maturity, it offers a deliciously fresh, tender bite that manages to stay crisp while also being succulent and mild.

The Green Machine produces an abundance of remarkable quality, uniformly shaped fruit that keep giving throughout the season.

This Zucchini is a top performer in Midwest and Southeast field trials, providing bountiful yields of fruit ranging from 6-7 inches in length.

Be sure to give the Zucchini plenty of room in your garden, spacing plants 18-24 inches apart.

52 to 55 days for full-sized pickles; much sooner for gherkins. For my time and money, there is no finer Cucumber for making sweet gherkins than Alibi. The fruit is absolutely delectable, with a good texture that holds up well for pickling, a perfect shape, and huge yields on space-saving plants.

This fruit reaches 4 inches long if you let it, but it will be more tender and succulent if you pick it much smaller (at about the size of your pinkie). It arises on very compact vines that take up less space in the garden.

It scores very well for yields and for various measures of fruit quality. This is a top-notch Cuke you won't want to miss!

Grow little gherkins in patio pots with this award-winning beauty! Parisian gherkin (don't you love the name) is one of the very few organic varieties ever to win an All-America Selections. But when the judges saw this compact, semi-vining plant setting masses of scrumptious little black-spined cukes, they had no choice!

Best picked at just 2 to 4 inches long (about 1 to 2 ounces), these cukes are not mushy little fall-aparts. They have texture, grip, and bite. Very crisp and flavorful, they are a delectable treat raw or sliced, but have been labeled gherkins because they hold up so well to pickling, and make the perfect little pickles for gourmet occasions as well as everyday noshing.

The plant reaches just 10 or 12 inches high, but is generously branched and sets about two dozen fruits. Of course, it can be grown in the veggie patch as well as in containers, and shows great vigor in any setting.

66 days from setting out plants. Grow your broccoli the natural way this year with Belstar Organic Hybrid, a superbly adaptable, compact plant that sets tightly held, delicious blue-green heads in both spring and fall.

These domed heads reach 6 to 8 inches wide, with a blue-green cast and very tight beading to lock in that succulent flavor. The plant itself reaches 16 to 20 inches high and 16 inches wide.

If you've thought about growing organically, make Broccoli one of the first crops you choose. The florets are very difficult to get completely clean of sprays and other chemicals, so they're best grown with only Certified Organic treatments. And when you start with Certified Organic seed such as Belstar, you know you're growing the best!

Developed just for salsa, this medium-hot chile pepper turns out to be heavy bearing and delicious, too. Boasting just the right amount of heat, it can be picked green for salsa or allowed to turn red for full nutritional kick and use in salads, sauces, and more.

Garden Salsa Hybrid scores 3,000 Scovilles on the heat index, which gives it a nice little bite in salsa but doesn't produce so much heat that diners have to be warned before they try it. It's a great all-purpose pepper, because it does offer a nicely nuanced flavor that works in a variety of dishes.

Expect these long, skinny peppers to reach 8 or 9 inches long but just about an inch in diameter at the widest point (the shoulders). The skin is thin, glossy, and firm, protecting the succulent flesh within, you can even dry Garden Salsa Hybrid and then grind it into spice.

Days to Maturity: 130 from direct sow

This smooth-skinned, nicely-rounded green gourd is just crying out to be a crafts project. Perfect for birdhouses, this Lagenaria (bottle-shaped) type is as fun after harvest as it is to grow.

Very easy and heavy-bearing, the Birdhouse gourd is ideal for families, class projects, and craftspeople of all types.

A hybrid hot pepper, Quickfire is grown as a fruit vegetable. Although Quickfire is highly ornamental, it is typically grown for its high yields of tasty peppers.

The attractive plant sets small, star-shaped "perfect" flowers followed by a profusion of 1.7-inch, conical green fruits that mature red and stand erect on the plant. These Thai-type chilies are hot, rating 40,000 units on the Scoville scale. Use fresh or dried and ground as a spice. Hot peppers are a good source of vitamin C.

Typically grown as an annual, Quickfire, an herbaceous, frost-tender, short-lived evergreen perennial, is a member of the nightshade family (Solanaceae). A Capsicum annum, commonly called cayenne pepper, chili pepper, or hot pepper, Quickfire grows rapidly, forming a very compact, bushy plant with ovate, smooth-margined, dark green leaves.

Never predictable and always a delight, this mixture is for gourd fanciers tired of the same old look.

It is simply the most diverse collection of gourds we know, with fruits ranging from egg-sized to gargantuan—and everything in between.

Both smooth and warted varieties are included, and the colors span the full range of this beloved fruit—whites, creams, yellows, tans, oranges, and of course greens, with many speckled, spotted, banded and striped types.