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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Why does this expression mean normal, standard, ordinary? Why doesn't its meaning pay respect to what gardens are, or what variety is? Or what gardens and variety are, put together! Because gardens are all about variety, not garden_variety.
Supermarket vegetables tend to be the same size, shape, colour... a result of big farms and uniform growing practices. I've grown up expecting romaine lettuce to be large, wilted on the outside, and rather bland. In the garden it grows in small, tasty leaves that I can pull apart individually instead of wrenching the whole bunch out of the ground. Zucchinis are at the other end of the scale: I've grown up expecting them to be the size of cucumbers, and in the garden they're huge. I picked one that was more than a foot long. It looked like a cross between a watermelon and a squash.
Also, there's more variety within single types of vegetables. You can get tomatoes that are small, large, round, and pear-shaped, all from the same plant. You can find delicate dandelion leaves (weed them, but save some to eat, because they're yummily edible) among others that are fuzzy and tough. The green pepper plants produce regular large-size specimens as well as oddly twisted ones that look like jalapenos, but are still plain sweet peppers, and probably sweeter because the flavour is more concentrated.
So don't let me hear garden variety used to mean the opposite of what it should mean!
(End rant. EoI exits stage left to see if she can find some remaining parsley leaves. Close curtain.)
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