Heirloom Vegetables For Your Garden

More and more seed companies are offering and successfully selling heirloom vegetable seeds to today’s gardeners. Heirloom seeds often produce richer flavored vegetables that our grandparents used to enjoy in the era before modern hybrid seeds. Keep in mind, today’s hybrid vegetables are still nourishing, flavorful, and more convenient to grow compared to heirloom vegetables. As a matter of fact, these advantages are the reasons for the creation of hybrid seeds from the start. Although, just as with homemade chicken soup and handcrafted furniture, many people think the added work that these vegetables require is warranted by the old-fashioned flavor and the tactile connection to our ancestors. Another must see is the Black & Decker CMM1200 Cordless Electric Mower.

By and large, the vegetable seeds which are designated heirloom seeds must share two attributes. They have to be open-pollinated, and the variety needs to be a minimum of 50 years old. Even though many seeds now being featured in catalogs or stores may meet one of the aforementioned requirements, they must actually meet both standards for a trustworthy seed business to describe them as Heirloom.  Don’t forget to look at the Black & Decker MM875 Mulching Mower.

Nearly all seeds available right now are called Hybrids. A hybrid is a plant which is the result of cross-pollinating two other plants. One problem experienced with hybrids is, they aren’t able to replicate themselves. If you plant these seeds, then gather the seeds from the hybrid plants, that next generation of seeds will only come with the characteristics of one of its genetic forebearers. Possibly an oversimplified illustration would be clearer. If your seeds produce hybrid plants resulting from a cross-pollination of red peppers and yellow peppers, the hybrid will produce orange peppers. If you harvest the seeds from the orange peppers and plant them, the resulting plants would only produce either green or yellow peppers. 

Heirloom seeds, however, are open-pollinated seeds. This means that if you remove seeds from this type of plants, the second generation plants should grow ‘true to type, in other words, the very same vegetable will appear generation after generation. The ability of heirloom vegetables to replicate themselves is the means by which these varieties have continued producing for so many years.

While the fifty year minimum for tracing back  heirloom varieties might appear to be arbitrary, the era which followed the Second World War delineates the beginning of when American seed companies started developing and selling the more hardy hybrid vegetable seeds. This generation’s gardeners have sprouted a new appreciation  for the old fashioned vegetable varieties, nowadays, and the seed companies have answered that need by dedicating increasing amounts of advertizing space to Heirloom varieties.

Please do not presume that hybrid vegetables are always inferior. The technology which gave us modern hybrid vegetables has led to better growing conditions and higher yields in modern agriculture, a situation which has multinational advantages. Heirloom vegetables are appreciated by many home gardeners, however, thanks to their texture and flavor, and their ability to call upon memories of Grandma’s tomato slices.