Why You Need To Stop Saving Heirloom Seeds And Move To A More Resilient Garden

If you are wanting to grow food reliably for you, your family, and even your community, there is a better way to grow tasty food and save seeds.

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Why you need to stop saving heirloom seeds and move to a more resilient garden

I may have made you fall off your seat with that statement! But what if there is a better way to grow food that is incredibly delicious to eat, and it grows really well in the garden?  Would you trade in growing only heirloom varieties if you could have a garden that thrives to the way you garden?  One that produces a harvest no matter the weather.

Some food for thought there!  So, whilst that is mulling around in the back of your mind, let’s first establish what some common seed growing and saving terms mean.

Heirloom

An heirloom plant variety is one that has been grown and maintained by only breeding with other plants of the same variety for many years, usually more than 50 years.  They often have a story attached to them about how they were found and discovered or even grown.  These seeds may have also been passed down through families.  Heirloom plants can be difficult to grow in a garden, requiring more support to go.  They often need more vigilant checks for pests and diseases and may even need more inputs to grow like fertilizer.

Open-Pollinated

These varieties of plants will grow true to type, meaning the plants you will grow to look like the parent plants that you saved the seed from.  Pollen is shared between plants of the same variety.  If this sounds like an heirloom, it’s because heirloom plants are also open-pollinated.  The difference is for an heirloom is that the variety has been kept for longer than 50 years.

Hybrids

Commercial hybrids are created when 2 highly inbred parents have the pollen shared between them to produce the seeds.  These hybrids may have patents on them, have statements like PVP or Plant Variety Protection, or their creation is proprietary information for the seed company or plant breeder.  You see these varieties as F1 hybrids in seed catalogs or on a stand in the big box store.

Commercial hybrids of broccoli, cabbage, kale, cauliflower, turnip, parsnips, rutabaga or swede, radish, onion, carrots, beets, lettuce, and sunflowers have cytoplasmic male sterility.  They have been bred to not produce pollen (that comes from the male plant parts) and the plants cannot self pollinate.  In addition, the offspring produced from these hybrids with the cytoplasmic male sterility is missing anthers that produce pollen, these plants are permanently male sterile.

How are the inbred parents made?

The inbred parents are made by selecting plants of the same variety which best show the traits that the plant breeder or the seed company is looking for.  These plants of the same variety are pollinated or crossed with each other over and over again.

But you might be thinking, that inbreeding sounds kind of like what heirlooms or even open-pollinated are and you would be correct.  Hybrids have what is known as hybrid vigor.  It appears as strong, fast growth and means that the hybrid plant is growing better than the inbred parent plants.  You might have seen this in your own garden when you have saved seed and planted it again.  Your saved seeds grow better than the seeds of the parent varieties.  This is more likely to come from the sharing of the genetics from the pollination of different plant varieties is starting to reverse inbreeding depression.

Inbreeding Depression

Problems like loss of growth, spindly plants, more susceptibility to pests, more issues with disease, fewer seeds being produced because the plants are not as fertile, low germination rate, low yields are all signs of inbreeding depression.  These are not uncommon issues for heirlooms.

This problem occurs when plants are too inbred.  They have low genetic variability because the plants are pollinating with other plants that are too closely related and too genetically similar.  The plants are not sharing pollen with enough plants, also known as population size. 

For healthy plants, you need diversity!

Why move from saving heirloom seeds?

Let me start off that heirlooms are culturally important to maintain.  They are living history and they should form part of your seed collection.

But.

If you are wanting to grow a resilient garden that will provide for you, your family, and even your community no matter how the weather is beating down on your garden, or the pests that come through your yard.  Then you need to look at another way to garden.

Heirlooms look and taste great, but they are not very good for adapting.  If you want to have a slightly more hands-off approach to gardening, really home in on low inputs like no fertilizers, no pesticides, little irrigation perhaps.  Then you need to consider landrace gardening.

What is a landrace?

Plants that are genetically diverse, freely pollinating, and locally adapted.  You don’t need special seed-saving equipment to prevent pollination from other plant varieties or anything like that because you want them to pollinate with the different plant varieties.

Landrace varieties are made by a survival of the fittest and gardener preference for seed saving selection.  So basically, if it grows well in your garden without you having to coddle it growing like a neurotic parent, and you like how it tastes, then you save seeds from those plants to plant again in your garden the following season.

That next season you do the same thing again.  Each season you do this, your plants hone in on how you grow your garden, and how you want them to taste.

This is basic plant breeding and how the heirlooms of today were selected and maintained!  This is a right for all of humanity, to be able to grow food and save seeds to grow food again.

Dig In and Learn More

If this post has started ideas for your garden, be sure to check out these related posts and helpful books:

• Landrace Gardening: How To Adapt Your Garden Plants To Local Conditions
• Grow More Food In The Space You Have With Intensive Gardening
• Landrace Gardening: Food Security through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination by Joseph Lofthouse
• Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening: Innovative Techniques for Growing Vegetables, Grains, and Perennial Food Crops with Minimal Fossil Fuel and Animal Inputs 
• Now Is The Time To Diversify Your Seeds

Would you give up a garden of heirlooms for one that reliably produces delicious harvests? Let me know over in the Facebook group 

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