![]() High yields have taken priority with nutrient-content being pushed to the back-burner. There are some interesting studies that have shown a decrease in the nutrient-density of our food supply over the decades. If you are careful with your seed saving, you could stop buying seeds indefinitely! (Until you start looking at catalogs and you get the itch to try something new… But I digress.) ![]() However, you don’t have to worry about that with heirlooms. Seed Saving. As I mentioned above, saving hybrid seeds doesn’t work since the seeds won’t produce true to type.If you plan on saving the seeds from your heirloom plants, some varieties will adapt to their location and grow a little bit better each year. The taste difference alone is worth sourcing and growing heirloom seeds. However, I couldn’t get enough of my heirloom spinach crop! It had a flavor like I’ve never experienced from store-bought spinach, and I found myself going out to the garden several times per day to grab handfuls. ![]() Normally I’m just “meh” when it comes to spinach it’s fine, but nothing I really crave. Last summer I grew an heirloom spinach crop in our raised beds. Heirloom tomatoes taste like, well, tomatoes not the bland mush you’re used to getting at the store. The taste! Heirloom veggies haven’t been subjected to selective breeding that favors uniformity and their ability to be shipped cross-country over taste.GMOs are highly controversial, and I prefer to steer clear of them whenever I can. It costs a lot of money to genetically modify something, so most companies focus on the process for large-scale industrial crops. You can’t do this at home and it’s unlikely you’ll run across many GMO seeds in your home-gardening seed catalogs. A GMO is something that has been altered with molecular genetic techniques. Not genetically modified. I see a lot of folks confusing hybrids with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and they are NOT the same thing.And so if you are growing hybrids, you’ll have to repurchase seed each year. However, it would be pointless to save seeds from your new hybrid plant, as any seeds you held back would not produce true to the type of either parent. By crossing these two plants, you feasibly could create a hybrid that would give you the best of both worlds. But you also have another variety of tomato that has fantastic yields, but smaller fruit. For example, let’s say you have a variety of tomato that grows big, beautiful fruit, but doesn’t produce a large yield. ![]() Hybrids are plants that have been artificially crossed for better production, color, portability, etc. This means they may have been lovingly cultivated and preserved by someone’s great-great-grandma, or grown as a market-variety hundreds of years ago. Most folks agree that in order to be considered an heirloom, a plant must have been around for at least 50 years, although many varieties have been around for much longer.
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