Heirloom Seeds: Budget Gardening Tip
If you’re familiar with the taste of farm-grown tomatoes bought on roadside stands, you know the importance of heirloom seeds. With the advent of hybrid seeds, the older, open-pollinated heirloom varieties are getting more difficult to find. While hybrids offer many advantages, such as disease resistance, greater productivity, and uniformly sized- and shaped-fruit, they just can’t match heirlooms’ taste.
In addition, with heirloom seeds, the ripening process is staggered, which means your fruits and veggies will ripen on an ongoing basis. Many hybrids were bred to ripen at the same time, which optimized mechanical harvesting of the plants.
With a little extra care and planning, heirloom varieties can do just as well as the hybrids in your vegetable garden. The seeds can be found at local big box and nursery stores, and online. Seed Savers offers several varieties, including Cherokee Purple Tomato - $2.75 for 50 seeds - and Plum Lemon Tomato - $2.75 for 50 seeds.
Park Seed Co. has a Tomato Heirloom Rainbow Blend - Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Dixie Golden Giant, Black from Tula, Brandywine Red, Big Rainbow, and Cherokee Purple - $1.95 for a 30-seed packet. Start seeds in pots indoors, or in the ground after all danger of frost as passed, and soon you’ll have your own fresh tomatoes to enjoy.
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Comments
Heirloom seeds bring back ‘character’ to the vegetable garden. They are rather like elderly relatives - not quite up to date, but add interest to the party!
Actually, heirloom plants have great flavor and have been honed by years of growing and adapting as opposed to genetic and chemical engineering.
Their flavor is more full and they are better at adapting to the local climates. In her book ANIMAL VEGETABLE MIRACLE, Barbara Kingsolver talks a lot about heirloom seeds and the benefits they provide. So they are more than just your grandma sitting on the porch telling you how things used to be.