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More and more seed companies are marketing and regularly selling heirloom vegetable seeds to today's gardeners. Heirloom seeds normally grow richer flavored vegetables which our grandparents used to regularly eat in the years when there were no modern hybrid seeds. Of course, our hybrid vegetables continue to be nourishing, tasty, and more convenient to grow when measured against heirloom vegetables. As a matter of fact, these advantages continue to be the purpose which led to the creation of hybrid seeds from the start. Although, just as with homemade jelly and hand fashioned sweaters, many people feel the added effort that these vegetables need is justified by the old-fashioned taste and the tactile connection to our ancestors.

Generally speaking, the vegetable seeds which are designated heirloom seeds must show two traits. They must be open-pollinated, and the variety must be no less than 50 years old. Even though some seeds currently sold in catalogs or stores may meet one of the aforementioned standards, they really have to meet both requirements for a trustworthy seed business to describe them as Heirloom.

Most seeds available currently are called Hybrids. A hybrid is a variety which is the result of cross-pollinating two different plants. One drawback experienced with hybrids is, they will never replicate themselves. If you plant hybrid seeds, then gather the seeds from the first generation plants, that second generation of seeds will only contain the characteristics of one of its genetic predecessors. Perhaps a very basic illustration may clear this up. If your seeds grow into hybrid plants resulting from a combination of red peppers and yellow peppers, the hybrid could produce orange peppers. If you remove the seeds from the orange peppers and plant them, the next group of plants would just produce either green or yellow peppers.

Heirloom seeds, on the other hand, are open-pollinated varieties. Therefore, if you remove seeds from heirloom plants, the resulting plants will grow "true to type", in other words, the exact same vegetable will be grown over and over. The capability of these vegetables to reproduce themselves is the means by which these varieties have carried on for fifty or a hundred years.

While the fifty year mark for establishing the heirloom varieties could seem arbitrary, the time period which followed the Second World War marks the beginning of when commercial seed companies were developing and selling the more hardy hybrid vegetable seeds. Modern gardeners have developed a new taste for the heirloom vegetable varieties, though, and the seed companies have answered that need by dedicating increasing amounts of advertising space to Heirloom varieties.

Please do not presume that hybrid vegetables are inherently unhealthy. The effort which produced today's hybrid vegetables has produced less expensive planting and higher yields in modern agriculture, and that has multinational advantages. Heirloom vegetables are appreciated by a few home gardeners, anyway, because of their texture and flavor, as well as their penchant to bring back memories of Grandma's tomato slices.

Ibrahim Hasan operates a Lawn Mowers Review website that informs his readers about the different styles of Black & Decker Mowers available.

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