Gardening Heirloom Seeds

gardening heirloom seeds

Hybrid seed is a seed that has two or more different parents resulting in an offspring that is new variety of that plant. These seeds are not sterile but when you plant seed you have saved from a hybrid plant you will get many different varieties of that plant the next year. For example, I planted seeds I saved from the pepper variety Valencia and got 5 different kinds of peppers. This is normal when saving seeds from hybrids.

Heirloom seeds are open pollinated which means the seed you save will produce plants that look exactly like the parents (as long as you don’t have any cross pollination which will produce a hybrid seed). heirlooms also have to have a history to them to be considered heirlooms and not just open pollinated. generally heirlooms are seeds that have been lovingly passed down from generation to generation for hundreds or years.

Again, I can use an example from my own experience. I do a lot of seed saving and also do some seed breeding and I have developed a couple of tomatoes that are open pollinated but cannot be considered heirloom because they are new varieties that have been in existence for less than 75 years.

Both hybrids and heirloom seed can be either organic or conventional. that status depends on whether or not the parents were grown on an organic or conventional farm.

Cottage Gardener: Heirloom Seeds

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