An increasing percentage of seed companies are marketing and repeatedly selling heirloom vegetable seeds to today’s gardeners. Heirloom seeds often lead to better flavored vegetables like the ones our grandparents used to regularly eat in the time before modern hybrid seeds. Keep in mind, our hybrid vegetables continue to be healthy, tasty, and simpler to grow compared to heirloom vegetables. As a matter of fact, these advantages are the purpose for the development of hybrid seeds to begin with. Although, just as with homemade chicken soup and handcrafted sweaters, many people think the added work that these vegetables call for is warranted by the old-fashioned flavor and the tenuous connection to our past. Another must see is the Black & Decker CMM1200 Cordless Electric Mower.
For the most part, the vegetable seeds which are considered heirloom seeds should share two attributes. They must be open-pollinated, and the variety ought to be no less than 50 years old. Even though certain seeds currently sold in catalogs or stores may meet one of the aforementioned prerequisites, they must actually meet both standards for a reputable seed company to call them Heirloom. Don’t forget to look at the Black & Decker MM875 Mulching Mower.
The majority of seeds bought today are classified as Hybrids. A hybrid is a species which is the result of cross-pollinating two different plants. The drawback encountered with hybrids is, they aren’t able to replicate themselves. If you plant these seeds, then harvest the seeds from the resulting plants, that second generation of seeds will merely have the characteristics of one of its genetic forebearers. Maybe a more concrete explanation may clear this up. If your seeds produce hybrid plants resulting from a cross-pollination of red peppers and yellow peppers, the hybrid may create orange peppers. If you gather the seeds from these peppers and plant them, the next group of plants will merely grow either green or yellow peppers.
Heirloom seeds, on the other hand, are open-pollinated species. As a result, if you remove seeds from heirloom plants, the next group of plants should grow ‘true to type, meaning that the identical vegetable will keep growing generation after generation. The capacity of open-pollinated vegetables to replicate themselves is the reason these varieties have continued producing for fifty or a hundred years.
While the fifty year minimum for recognizing the heirloom varieties may appear to be arbitrary, the era after the Second World War marks the beginning of when commercial seed companies started developing and marketing the more hardy hybrid vegetable seeds. This generation’s gardeners have sprouted a new approval for the heirloom vegetable varieties, however, and the seed companies have answered that need by dedicating more and more advertizing space to Heirloom varieties.
Please do not assume that hybrid vegetables are considered unhealthy. The research which gave us today’s hybrid vegetables has led to disease and drought resistance and higher yields in American agriculture, and that has worldwide advantages. Heirloom vegetables are preferred by many home gardeners, anyway, as a result of their texture and flavor, and their ability to call upon memories of Grandma’s tomato sandwiches.
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