A growing number of seed companies are featuring and successfully selling heirloom vegetable seeds to modern gardeners. Heirloom seeds routinely grow better flavored vegetables which our grandparents used to regularly eat in the years when there were no modern hybrid seeds. Naturally, modern hybrid vegetables continue to be nourishing, tasty, and easier to grow than heirloom vegetables. Actually, these advantages are the reasons which led to the advent of hybrid seeds in the first place. However, just as with homemade jelly and handcrafted sweaters, many of us have decided that the extra work that these vegetables need is warranted by the old-fashioned taste and the nostalgic connection to our past.  Don’t forget to look at the Black & Decker CMM1200 Cordless Electric Mower.

Generally speaking, the vegetable seeds which are designated heirloom seeds have to exhibit two characteristics. They must be open-pollinated, and the variety ought to be a minimum of 50 years old. Although many seeds currently sold in catalogs or stores could meet one of the aforementioned prerequisites, they need to meet both standards for an honest seed company to call them Heirloom.  A nice comparable model to check out is the Black & Decker MM875 Mulching Mower.

Most seeds available currently are called Hybrids. A hybrid is a species which is the result of cross-pollinating two genetically separate varieties. The drawback people have with hybrids is, they can’t replicate themselves. If you plant these seeds, then recover the seeds from the hybrid plants, that second generation of seeds will merely have the genetic material of one of its genetic predecessors. Perhaps a very basic example might clear this up. If your seeds grow into hybrid plants which were a synthesis of red peppers and yellow peppers, the hybrid may produce orange peppers. If you harvest the seeds from these peppers and plant them, the second generation plants would just grow either green or yellow peppers. 

Heirloom seeds, on the other hand, are open-pollinated species. Therefore, if you harvest seeds from this type of plants, the resulting plants will grow “true to type”, which means the exact same vegetable will appear year after year. The capacity of these vegetables to copy themselves is the means by which these varieties have survived for so many years.

While the fifty year standard for establishing the  heirloom varieties could strike you as arbitrary, the time period following the Second World War marks the start of when major seed companies began developing and advertising the more robust hybrid vegetable seeds. Modern gardeners have sprouted a new taste  for the old fashioned vegetable varieties, nowadays, and the seed companies have responded by dedicating growing percentages of advertizing space to Heirloom vegetables.

Please do not assume that hybrid vegetables are inherently bad. The technology which produced our hybrid vegetables has led to less expensive planting and higher yields in American agriculture, a situation which has international benefits. Heirloom vegetables are appreciated by a few home gardeners, though, as a result of their texture and flavor, as well as their propensity to bring back memories of Grandma’s tomato soup.