We’re now well into the planting season, and many of you in the temperate northern climates are wondering what kind of seeds or plants you should be using. There’s a lot of talk about the importance of using heirloom or open pollinated seeds and seedlings, rather than hybrids, and some discussions get very heated. Let’s clear the air, shall we? I will discuss arguments on both sides of the issue, and my reasons for believing that hybrids are well worth using in your garden.
Some folks feel they should always be able to use the seeds from the plants they grow for their next crop, and that because seeds from hybrid plants do not produce the same as the parent they are being robbed of that on-going benefit. Also there is concern that hybrids might become unavailable in the future, leaving the grower with inferior plants from the “throwback” seeds of a hybrid crop. These are valid arguments for using heirlooms.
However, some people are actually fearful of using hybrids, blasting them as being a terrible thing, against natural law, and even dangerous for us to be using. I read an article recently where the author claimed that hybrid plants were sterile. I submit that these people are lacking in understanding of the facts, and are confusing hybrids with GMO seeds, which are entirely different (and even GMO seeds are not sterile)!
First of all, we humans are all hybrids! And most of us can reproduce, just as the hybrid vegetable seeds can reproduce. Furthermore, our progeny will be different than we are, just as the progeny from hybrid plants’ seeds will be different from either of the parents.
In humans it makes for uniqueness and diversity and is wonderful. In vegetables and fruits, where we look for uniformity and consistency, it isn’t always so great, unless it is closely controlled – and how is this done in the world of plants?
Honorable dedicated growers spend their working lives painstakingly cross-breeding multiplied thousands of plants, in order to find the parental match that gives you and me the tastiest, healthiest, fastest growing, and most disease resistant fruits and vegetables possible.
And even after they have found that perfect match they must continue to work HARD and CAREFULLY to assure that each desirable female blossom is pollinated with the exact desired male pollen. Imagine the work involved with tomatoes, for example, where the blossom is smaller than your little fingernail and EACH BLOSSOM CONTAINS BOTH MALE AND FEMALE PARTS!
This means they have to use tiny tweezers and magnifying classes to REMOVE the male anther BEFORE it is mature, and then introduce the CORRECT male anther to the female pistil at the exact time they both are mature, and then hope pollination and germination both occur – all the while making certain that no OUTSIDE pollinators, such as bees, get to the blossom.
Because of what I’ve described above, the cost of producing great hybrid seeds is tremendous, and what does that mean to you and me in the cost of seeds? Let’s compare one of the best hybrid seed varieties with a well known heirloom seed and see what it means in your garden.
The heirloom Ace tomato seeds can be purchased from Mountain Valley Seed Company, in Salt Lake City, for $4.50 per ounce. That’s 10,000 seeds for next to nothing! How many will you plant in your backyard family garden – somewhere between 10 and 50? Either way the seed cost is almost nothing. On the other side of the equation, what will they produce? Probably quite a few pounds per plant, but the size, taste, and other qualities we want in a great tomato are not available.
Big Beef tomato seeds, on the other hand, cost $250 per ounce! That’s more than 50 times as much as the Ace! The smallest quantity MVSeeds.com sells is 100 seeds, and in that quantity they cost $5.
75. So, each seed costs 6 cents. That’s terrible, isn’t it!?
Or is it, really. Let’s compare what you get for your 6 cents with what you get from your virtually free Ace seed.
The Ace is a determinate plant and produces a crop of medium sized tomatoes for a few weeks, whereas Big Beef is an indeterminate plant and produces great yields of large, juicy, tasty tomatoes for MANY months – even longer than a year in the tropics – until frost kills it.
The Big Beef tomato plant also has the best disease resistance of almost any tomato variety known to man. That single fact often means the difference between great success and total failure in your garden. How many times have you or someone you know lavished MONTHS of time, energy, and money on your tomato plants only to have some disease wipe them all out about the time you finally started to harvest a crop. It’s not uncommon! Just last year disease wiped out a substantial part of the tomato crop in many areas of the USA because of frequent and excessive rainfall!
I figure that each Big Beef tomato plant in my garden will produce between $30 and $60 in tomatoes. If I grew Ace tomatoes each plant would most likely produce between $10 and $20 in tomatoes. Now how important is the cost of seed?
For my very limited budget Big Beef, and the other hybrids I use, are worth their cost MANY TIMES OVER!
If the foregoing argument for using hybrids failed to convince you, consider two other issues briefly, and I will rest my case.
For many vegetables the practicality of producing, saving, and using your own seeds is very difficult, time consuming, and costly, and here’s why: For all of the non fruit-bearing crops it requires two growing cycles for the plant to produce seed. That means for all lettuces, brassicas (cabbage, etc.) and root crops (carrots, turnips, etc.), as well as spinach and chard, the plants must be left in the garden after maturity, so they can re-direct their energy and the bulb or whatever they’ve spent months creating into making seeds for a new generation of plants.
So, instead of being able to eat your crop you must leave it in place for an additional 2-3 months – or even until the next year – while it completes its life cycle. This creates a mess in your garden; it invites bugs, other pests, and diseases, and of course that space cannot be used for anything else.
You have to continue to water and weed the whole time. And then you have to carefully and properly harvest, prepare, and preserve the seeds so that they will be ready and viable when you need them next.
I suggest that for the vast majority of us, who barely find the time and energy to follow the prophets’ counsel and grow a garden in the first place, this extra burden of time and work just will not get done in most cases.
So what’s the solution? It is very simple. Buy and grow the very best, highest producing, healthiest, tastiest and most disease-resistant hybrids you can find, And to protect against the possibility of someday not being able to get good hybrid seeds, keep a triple-sealed #10 can of the best available heirloom seeds you can find in a cool dry place with your other food storage.
We’re blessed to have the Mountain Valley Seed Company – owned by Dimetrius Agathangelides (LDS) right in Salt Lake City or online at https://www.mvseeds.com/. These folks have gone to great lengths to produce what I believe is the best heirloom seed storage bargain in the country. The can contains 16 of the most common varieties of vegetables – enough to plant 2/3rds of an acre! And it can be found at Emergency Essentials, <a href="https://www.
<hr class=’system-pagebreak’ ></a><hr class=’system-pagebreak’ ></a><hr class=’system-pagebreak’ ></a>mvseeds.com/”>MVSeeds.com, or at Food For Everyone’s website. I highly recommend this as the best solution – grow the best plants you possibly can, and save heirloom seeds for future emergencies.
