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What exactly are Heirloom Vegetable Seeds and Heirloom Vegetables?

This short article by Benard W. O. Shaw explains what qualifies as an heirloom vegetable seed and why, and explores the different traits that heirloom vegetables ought to have.

Experts within the area agree that heirloom vegetables are old, open-pollinated plants. These varieties are recognized for being high quality and simple to grow. Let's look at their traits a bit much better:

Trait 1: Age

There is considerable disagreement on how outdated a plant ought to be to become regarded as an heirloom. Some experts say plants only qualify as heirloom vegetables if they had been launched before 1951. There are many good reasons for 1951 to be the cut-off, and lots of heirloom gardeners focus on growing varieties that date in the 1920s and earlier.

While many of the heritage Tomato seeds varieties are 100--150 many years old, amazingly there are a few heirlooms that are an excellent deal older. Study completed on these seeds and plants has indicated in many instances that they're centuries outdated. Experts think that certain heirlooms are even traditional Native American crops that are pre-Columbian. Other heirlooms are outdated European crops, some of which have been grown for nearly 4 hundred years. Still other heirlooms trace their ancestries to Africa and Asia. They too may be significantly older than records state, but distance and language make it difficult to track down their histories.

Gardeners also vary about which outdated types ought to be labeled as heirlooms. For some gardeners the solution is simple, because they consider almost all of the old-time varieties of plants to be heirlooms. To other people, types can be old with out becoming known as heirlooms. They exclude commercial types and those that appeared in the seed trade, thus limiting heirlooms only to these nearby or regional varieties which have been passed down from generation to generation of gardeners.

Trait two: Open-Pollinated

What open-pollination basically means is that a particular cultivar may be grown from seed and will come back "true to type." The next generation will appear similar to its parent. This really is accomplished by planting an heirloom tomato, permitting a few of the fruit to mature after which collecting the seed. If it's processed properly, and stored correctly, the following year, once the seed is planted it'll develop another identical tomato.

These days there are excellent numbers of vegetables which will not come back "true to kind." If you plant almost any F-1 hybrid tomato, and undergo the actions mentioned over to conserve the seed, when you plant it in the spring, it's questionable what will happen. There is a great opportunity the seed won't even germinate, because it might be sterile. And if it does start to develop, the young plants will most likely lack the traits that produced its parent useful. That's the difficulty with hybrids. While they might certainly have quite a few superb qualities, the capability to reproduce themselves isn't 1 of them.

Trait 3: Quality

What lures numerous gardeners to heirloom Tomato seeds and heirloom plants is, to put it merely, flavor. They want their tomatoes to taste like real tomatoes. They want corn that tastes like it did in their childhoods. Following trying various varieties that may develop well, but just do not have that special taste they are searching for, they turn to heirlooms.