Spruce Up Your Garden With Heirloom Vegetables
Posted on April 2, 2010
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A growing number of seed companies are featuring and repeatedly selling heirloom vegetable seeds to appreciative gardeners. Heirloom seeds usually lead to distinctively flavored vegetables that our forebearers used to dine on in the time before modern hybrid seeds. Keep in mind, modern hybrid vegetables continue to be healthy, quite edible, and simpler to grow when measured against heirloom vegetables. Actually, these advantages continue to be the reasons for the development of hybrid seeds to begin with. Of course, just as with homemade jelly and handcrafted furniture, many people think the added effort that these vegetables require is warranted by the old-fashioned taste and the nostalgic connection to our heritage. Be sure to check out the Black & Decker CMM1200 Cordless Electric Mower.
For the most part, the vegetable seeds which are considered heirloom seeds have to have two characteristics. They have to be open-pollinated, and the variety should be no less than 50 years old. Although some seeds now being featured in catalogs or stores may meet one of the aforementioned standards, they really have to meet both standards for a reputable seed retailer to describe them as Heirloom. A nice comparable model to check out is the Black & Decker MM875 Mulching Mower.
Most seeds available right now are referred to as Hybrids. A hybrid is a species which is the product of cross-pollinating two different plants. The problem experienced with hybrids is, they will never replicate themselves. If you plant cross-pollinated seeds, then recover the seeds from the first generation plants, that next generation of seeds will just have the traits of one of its genetic parents. Perhaps a more concrete explanation would help. If your seeds become hybrid plants that are a combination of red peppers and yellow peppers, the hybrid will grow orange peppers. If you harvest the seeds from the orange peppers and plant them, the next group of plants would only produce either green or yellow peppers.
Heirloom seeds, however, are open-pollinated species. Therefore, if you remove seeds from this type of plants, the second generation plants will grow “true to type”, meaning that the very same vegetable will appear over and over. The capability of open-pollinated vegetables to copy themselves is the way these varieties have carried on for all those years.
While the fifty year mark for recognizing the heirloom varieties could appear to be arbitrary, the time period after the Second World War marks the start of when American seed companies were developing and selling the more durable hybrid vegetable seeds. Today’s gardeners have cultivated a new approval for the older vegetable varieties, though, and the seed companies have reacted by dedicating increasing amounts of advertizing space to Heirloom seeds.
Please do not assume that hybrid vegetables are considered wrong. The technology which gave us our hybrid vegetables has produced less expensive planting and higher yields in today’s agriculture, and that has international advantages. Heirloom vegetables are sought after by some home gardeners, anyway, because of their texture and flavor, and their ability to evoke memories of Grandma’s tomato sandwiches.
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