Spruce Up Your Garden With Heirloom Vegetables

A growing number of seed companies are advertising and successfully selling heirloom vegetable seeds to today’s gardeners. Heirloom seeds often grow distinctively flavored vegetables like the ones our grandparents used to enjoy in the days when there were no modern hybrid seeds. Of course, today’s hybrid vegetables remain healthy, flavorful, and more convenient to grow than heirloom vegetables. For that matter, these advantages continue to be the purpose behind the development of hybrid seeds to begin with. Of course, just as with homemade bread and handcrafted furniture, many folks feel the extra work that these vegetables call for is justified by the old-fashioned flavor and the tenuous connection to our heritage.  Don’t forget to look at the Black & Decker CMM1200 Cordless Electric Mower.

By and large, the vegetable seeds which are considered heirloom seeds must have two characteristics. They must be open-pollinated, and the variety should be at least 50 years old. Although certain seeds now being sold in catalogs or stores might meet one of the aforementioned standards, they must actually meet both prerequisites for a reputable seed business to describe them as Heirloom.  Another good model is the Black & Decker MM875 Mulching Mower.

Nearly all seeds available currently are referred to as Hybrids. A hybrid is a plant which is the result of cross-pollinating two different varieties. The drawback experienced with hybrids is, they will never replicate themselves. If you plant cross-pollinated seeds, then gather the seeds from the first generation plants, that following generation of seeds will merely come with the genetic material of one of its genetic parents. Perhaps a more concrete illustration would help. If your seeds produce hybrid plants that are a synthesis of red peppers and yellow peppers, the hybrid could produce orange peppers. If you gather the seeds from the orange peppers and plant them, the second generation plants will just offer either green or yellow peppers. 

Heirloom seeds, in contrast, are open-pollinated seeds. Consequently, if you recover seeds from this type of plants, the second generation plants should grow “true to type”, in other words, the very same vegetable will be grown year after year. The ability of heirloom vegetables to replicate themselves is the reason these varieties have carried on for so many years.

While the fifty year mark for establishing the  heirloom varieties could seem arbitrary, the time period which followed the Second World War delineates the start of when commercial seed companies were developing and selling the more resilient hybrid vegetable seeds. Today’s gardeners have sprouted a new taste  for the heirloom vegetable varieties, though, and the seed companies have reacted by committing growing percentages of advertizing space to Heirloom vegetables.

Please do not conclude that hybrid vegetables are always bad. The technology which produced our hybrid vegetables has given us disease and drought resistance and higher yields in American agriculture, a situation which has international benefits. Heirloom vegetables are appreciated by many home gardeners, anyway, as a result of their texture and flavor, and their propensity to call upon memories of Grandma’s tomato sandwiches.