Six years ago, I visited Burpee’s Fordhook Farm in Pennsylvania as part of the International Master Gardener Conference. We toured their trial garden, and one of the crops I noted was a direct-sow tomato plant. This is an exciting innovation to vegetable gardeners, because it means not having to start seeds indoors and raise your tomato plants under lights until it’s time to transplant them outdoors. You could just plant the seeds directly in the ground and still harvest your tomatoes at the same time as conventionally grown ones. I decided I had to try this when the seeds were available.

Well, it’s 2025, and the seeds have appeared in Burpee’s catalog, so I bought some. Here’s the lineup: two tomatoes and three peppers. I got seed for the Rain Drops tomato, a cherry (claims 70 days to maturity from sowing), and the Sow Sweet snacking pepper (60 days). Here’s how growing them went for me and what I thought of the results. (Note: this is nothing like a real field trial, but rather one small-scale gardener’s experience in one year.)

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