Better Veggies With Heirloom Seeds
An increasing percentage of seed companies are advertising and regularly selling heirloom vegetable seeds to modern gardeners. Heirloom seeds often produce distinctively flavored vegetables that our grandparents used to regularly eat in the years when there were no modern hybrid seeds. Naturally, our hybrid vegetables remain nutritious, quite edible, and easier to grow compared to heirloom vegetables. Actually, these advantages are the reasons which led to the creation of hybrid seeds from the start. However, just as with homemade chicken soup and hand fashioned quilts, many of us have decided that the extra work that these vegetables call for is merited by the old-fashioned taste and the tenuous connection to our heritage. Another must see is the Black & Decker CMM1200 Cordless Electric Mower.
For the most part, the vegetable seeds which are labeled as heirloom seeds must exhibit two attributes. They have to be open-pollinated, and the variety ought to be no less than 50 years old. Although certain seeds which are sold in catalogs or stores may meet one of the aforementioned prerequisites, they must actually meet both standards for an established seed retailer to describe them as Heirloom. Be sure to check out the Black & Decker MM875 Mulching Mower.
Nearly all seeds available today are referred to as Hybrids. A hybrid is a variety which is the outcome of cross-pollinating two other varieties. The issue encountered with hybrids is, they can’t replicate themselves. If you plant hybrid seeds, then gather the seeds from the first generation plants, that second generation of seeds will merely come with the characteristics of one of its genetic predecessors. Possibly a more concrete explanation would help. If your seeds produce hybrid plants that are a combination of red peppers and yellow peppers, the hybrid will create orange peppers. If you harvest the seeds from these peppers and plant them, the next group of plants will merely produce either green or yellow peppers.
Heirloom seeds, however, are open-pollinated species. As a result, if you harvest seeds from these plants, the resulting plants will grow “true to type”, meaning that the exact same vegetable will keep growing generation after generation. The capacity of open-pollinated vegetables to copy themselves is the reason these varieties have continued producing for fifty or a hundred years.
While the fifty year goal for recognizing the heirloom varieties could appear to be arbitrary, the era following the Second World War represents the start of when major seed companies were developing and advertising the more robust hybrid vegetable seeds. Modern gardeners have cultivated a new approval for the old fashioned vegetable varieties, though, and the seed companies have reacted by committing increasing amounts of advertizing space to Heirloom seeds.
Please do not assume that hybrid vegetables are always unhealthy. The research which produced our hybrid vegetables has produced less expensive planting and higher yields in modern agriculture, and that has multinational advantages. Heirloom vegetables are sought after by a few home gardeners, however, because of their texture and flavor, as well as their tendency to evoke memories of Grandma’s tomato soup.