Heirloom Vegetables For Your Garden
More and more seed companies are marketing and regularly selling heirloom vegetable seeds to today’s gardeners. Heirloom seeds normally grow richer flavored vegetables which our grandparents used to regularly eat in the years when there were no modern hybrid seeds. Of course, our hybrid vegetables continue to be nourishing, tasty, and more convenient to grow when measured against heirloom vegetables. As a matter of fact, these advantages continue to be the purpose which led to the creation of hybrid seeds from the start. Although, just as with homemade jelly and hand fashioned sweaters, many people feel the added effort that these vegetables need is justified by the old-fashioned taste and the tactile connection to our ancestors.
Generally speaking, the vegetable seeds which are called heirloom seeds should have two traits. They should be open-pollinated, and the variety should be at least 50 years old. While many seeds now being sold in catalogs or stores could meet one of the aforementioned prerequisites, they really have to meet both requirements for an established seed retailer to call them Heirloom.
Most seeds sold today are labeled as Hybrids. A hybrid is a plant which is the outcome of cross-pollinating two different varieties. A common drawback experienced with hybrids is, they aren’t able to replicate themselves. If you plant these seeds, then gather the seeds from the first generation plants, that next generation of seeds will only contain the traits of one of its genetic parents. Possibly a more concrete illustration may help. If some seeds produce hybrid plants resulting from a combination of red peppers and yellow peppers, the hybrid will produce orange peppers. If you harvest the seeds from these peppers and plant them, the resulting plants would just offer either green or yellow peppers.
Heirloom seeds, on the other hand, are open-pollinated varieties. Therefore, if you remove seeds from heirloom plants, the resulting plants will grow “true to type”, in other words, the exact same vegetable will be grown over and over. The capability of these vegetables to reproduce themselves is the means by which these varieties have carried on for fifty or a hundred years.
While the fifty year standard for tracing back heirloom varieties may seem arbitrary, the decade after the Second World War marks the start of when major seed companies started developing and selling the more robust hybrid vegetable seeds. This generation’s gardeners have developed a new approval for the old fashioned vegetable varieties, however, and the seed companies have reacted by dedicating increasing amounts of advertising space to Heirloom seeds.
Please do not presume that hybrid vegetables are inherently unhealthy. The effort which produced today’s hybrid vegetables has produced less expensive planting and higher yields in modern agriculture, and that has multinational advantages. Heirloom vegetables are appreciated by a few home gardeners, anyway, because of their texture and flavor, as well as their penchant to bring back memories of Grandma’s tomato slices.
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