Bright colours, something for everyone, attractive on paper, a sugary, nutty, fruity rush when you bite into it you but as you dwell on it you can't help wondering if it tasted better when you were a kid.
Sure it offers variety but in the passing years 'quality' and 'variety' have become so bland as to be meaningless; positive words detached from your senses but fixed in your brain. And when such words become meaningless you become a marketing guru's plaything. They can even make up associated words. Ribena is now full of 'Berryness'.
When I began growing, I just wanted to grow things like potatoes, beans, onions. That they come in varieties was lost on me at first. You rarely see varieties stocked for the discerning shopper. As far as I was aware, a cucumber is a cucumber.
Yet the garden centres are stocked with choice, and that's before you go online. I took two approaches this year. For runner beans I went on instinct, for blackcurrants I researched properly
Runner beans have striking but small colourful flowers. Last year mine were orange, this year I plumed for one red, one white. I planted them by separate canes in a big container in the hope that they would spiral up towards each other in a burst of contrast. Today the first flowers appeared and I'm actually excited about this experiment:
When I chose my blackcurrants I made a conscious decision on which variety to choose. I read widely and from 5 varieties, plumped for Ben Hope - deemed to be an excellent grower with heavy yields. But there was choice over the height, the taste, the amount of crop, the timing of the crop. It was actually quite empowering to choose what was right for me. And this is where varieties coax you deeper into the murky world of gardening...before you know it you'll be a veg snob.
All I'll say for now is that we'd all better keep this in check. Any garden snobs out there, take a good look at yourself. Why not try something new? Challenge yourself. Hell, why not walk into a garden centre and pick your next blackcurrant plant purely on Berryness
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