More and more seed companies are marketing and regularly selling heirloom vegetable seeds to appreciative gardeners. Heirloom seeds routinely produce better flavored vegetables which our great-grandparents used to regularly eat in the days prior to modern hybrid seeds. Naturally, our hybrid vegetables remain healthy, quite edible, and easier to grow than heirloom vegetables. As a matter of fact, these advantages were the purpose for the creation of hybrid seeds in the first place. However, just as with homemade jelly and hand fashioned furniture, many of us feel the additional effort that these vegetables require is warranted by the old-fashioned aroma and the tactile connection to our heritage. Another must see is the Black & Decker CMM1200 Cordless Electric Mower.
By and large, the vegetable seeds which are labeled as heirloom seeds are required to have two attributes. They should be open-pollinated, and the variety needs to be a minimum of 50 years old. Even though many seeds which are sold in catalogs or stores may meet one of the aforementioned prerequisites, they need to meet both standards for a reputable seed retailer to describe them as Heirloom. Be sure to check out the Black & Decker MM875 Mulching Mower.
Nearly all seeds bought right now are called Hybrids. A hybrid is a plant which is the outcome of cross-pollinating two different plants. One drawback encountered with hybrids is, they can’t replicate themselves. If you plant cross-pollinated seeds, then gather the seeds from the first generation plants, that next generation of seeds will merely have the characteristics of one of its genetic forebearers. Possibly an oversimplified explanation may clear this up. If your seeds produce hybrid plants resulting from a mixture of red peppers and yellow peppers, the hybrid might grow orange peppers. If you remove the seeds from the orange peppers and plant them, the second generation plants would only produce either green or yellow peppers.
Heirloom seeds, on the other hand, are open-pollinated varieties. As a result, if you remove seeds from these plants, the second generation plants will grow ‘true to type, which means the exact same vegetable will keep growing generation after generation. The capacity of these vegetables to reproduce themselves is the way these varieties have carried on for fifty or a hundred years.
While the fifty year minimum for establishing the heirloom varieties might seem arbitrary, the decade which followed the Second World War represents the beginning of when major seed companies were developing and selling the more durable hybrid vegetable seeds. Modern gardeners have developed a new taste for the older vegetable varieties, nowadays, and the seed companies have responded by committing more and more advertizing space to Heirloom vegetables.
Please do not assume that hybrid vegetables are inherently inferior. The efforst which produced our hybrid vegetables has produced disease and drought resistance and higher yields in modern agriculture, a situation which has multinational implications. Heirloom vegetables are appreciated by some home gardeners, anyway, as a result of their texture and flavor, and their propensity to call upon memories of Grandma’s tomato slices.
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Posted under Organic Vegetable Seeds
This post was written by admin on April 10, 2010
