Why You Need Heirloom Seeds for Your Garden

Unless you're into organic home gardening, it's likely that you don't know a lot about heirloom seeds. The little you've heard sounds like neo-hippie mumbo jumbo:

"They're completely natural."
"They're non-genetically modified."
"They're good for the environment."

So what?  you say. I just want big tomatoes.

You don't know it, but you want heirloom seeds. But first, you need to understand the difference between the hybrid seeds you buy in the local supercenter and heirloom seeds.

Hybrid Seeds vs. Heirloom Seeds

A few online heirloom seed stores I like:

Heirloom Seeds
Sustainable Seed Co.
Victory Seeds
Granny's Heirloom Seeds
My Patriot Supply

Seed manufacturers produce hybrid seeds by forcing two very different plants to breed together to create a seed that they wouldn't normally grow without human intervention. Technicians develop hybrid seeds in research gardens, and then the seeds are reproduced in large-scale manufacturing gardens using special equipment. The process works consistently and seeds can be mass produced efficiently. Because the parent plants are so different, the baby plant is different from both parents.

Heirloom seeds are produced by breeding two similar parent plants that each have traits that the gardener likes. For example, she might brush the pollen from a plant that produces particularly large tomatoes onto the flower of a tomato plant that seems to repel white flies better than the others. She then will cross her fingers and hope that the seeds from the mama tomato make baby plants with both traits: big tomatoes and no white flies.

If the baby has the desired characteristics, the gardener saves some of those seeds to use. If not, she tries again until she gets the right characteristics. Most heirloom seeds were bred decades or even centuries ago in just this way. They have been handed down through generations of gardeners; that's why they're called "heirlooms."

Now for why all of that matters.

Heirloom seeds by their very nature save you money.

Because hybrid seeds wouldn't naturally occur, they don't create seeds that reproduce the same plant. Typically, if you save and replant hybrid seeds, they do one of three things: they either grow a plant with fruit that looks and tastes differently than the parent plant, they produce no fruit, or they don't grow at all. To use hybrid seeds and get what you expected, you must buy newly manufactured hybrid seeds every time you plant.

Seeds saved from heirloom plants grow the same plant again. The baby plant's fruit will look and taste like the parent plant. So you don't have to keep buying new seeds every year. You can buy them once, save a few seeds from the best pumpkin, onion or carrot, and plant the same thing next year. Forever.  Or even better, you can buy a pumpkin grown with heirloom seeds at the local farmer's market (just ask the grower, they'll know) eat your tasty pumpkin pie, and save the seeds to start your own pumpkins next year. Over time, the savings add up.

Heirloom seeds save you work.

Because gardeners choose the best of their plants to breed, the plants that grew your heirloom seeds represents the best of their kind. They not only survive, but thrive in the climate they were bred for and their babies will thrive in the same environment. Choose heirloom seeds that were bred in or for your area, and you'll know that your vegetable plants will grow well at local temperature and rainfall levels without needing excessive attention and effort from you.

Heirloom seeds also often repel local pests and diseases. As with our no-white fly tomato above, gardeners chose to breed plants that were disease and bug resistant. Don't feel too grateful; they didn't do it for you. They did it because they didn't like picking bugs off their plants any more than you do. Stick with locally developed heirloom seeds and take advantage of their good common sense.

Unfortunately, because hybrid seeds are mass produced, they aren't developed with the same kind of local climate and pest-specific resistance in mind. A hybrid tomato that grows well in New York will still be sold in Georgia supercenters. If a Georgia gardener happens to pick that variety, they'll spend a lot of extra time trying to keep their plants from wilting in mid-summer. A Deep South heirloom tomato would be a much easier choice.

Heirloom seeds produce consistent results that last for generations.

In my opinion, the best part about heirloom seeds comes from knowing exactly what I'm getting year after year. Because the baby plant has the same characteristics as its parent, I know that once I find the variety of tomatoes that my family really loves, we can keep eating that same tomato for the rest of my life.

I never have to worry that it will be discontinued from my favorite seed catalog. I don't have to wonder whether they'll "improve" it into something that doesn't work as well for me - something that has happened in my gardening history more than once. I never have to hunt store to store to find the variety that I want because it's popular and sold out.

Most importantly, I know that if my kids and grandkids want to grow a few tomatoes s of their own, I'll have the best tomato seeds ready for them. I can't wait to hand down a few heirlooms of my own.