Hybrid or Heirloom?

As home vegetable gardening has become so much more common in the past few years more and more people come to me for advice or ask to see my garden. A kindergarten class is coming in a few weeks, the local Junior College has asked me to get involved in their new permaculture garden, a film maker wants to film my garden to try and raise money for his upcoming documentary on urban farming, a young couple in their new home heard me on the radio and want to look at my 100+ fruit trees to help them decide what to choose for their new yard, and the occasional neighbor shows up at the door with questions about this or that.

One of the questions I am asked most frequently is about hybrid and heirloom seeds. Actually it doesn't take a question to get me started. A simple comment might set me off. I admit that the controversy between these two types of seed is a pet peeve of mine, because they have become buzz words, bad and good, and there is a lot of misinformation. What is an heirloom seed? It has become a confusing term. It is a seed type that has been around for a long time, usually one that has not been maintained or developed by contemporary seed companies. Many of them have been collected from very small areas around the world where a neighborhood, or even a family have been saving their favorite vegetable variety seed for generations. These seeds are "open—pollinated," which means they will produce the same kind of vegetable in the next generation if the seed is saved properly. No one company owns these seeds, and heirloom vegetables have added an unbelievable richness of variety to our gardens and tables in recent years.

Hybrid, on the other hand, has become a bad word. Some people seem to believe that there is something to be avoided in hybrid seeds and advise others not to use them. This is ridiculous. All heirloom seeds ARE hybrids. Plant hybridizers back to early agrarian man and great great Aunt Mabel on the farm in Kentucky have all done exactly the same thing. They have grown successive generations of the same plant variety and chosen seeds or cross-pollinated for characteristics they want to emphasize. A tomato variety has to be around for many years for the breeder to stabilize the seed and produce true to type in following generations. The F1 (first generation) hybrid that may have been developed recently will not reproduce true to type. In many respects the terms heirloom and hybrid represent phases of a variety's development. Some of the tomatoes that Aunt Mabel had high hopes for did not improve and stabilize and were discarded. Some of todays new hybrids may stabilize in time. Also, the seed companies, seeking more ways to make money, have patented some of their varieties. One of my long time garden favorites and most prolific vegetables is Burpee's Butterbush—a compact Butternut squash that thrives in my garden. I can only get it from Burpee and this does not bother me. I hope that their plant hybridizers continue to come up with more varieties for us to try. Do you eat Pluots?? Or Nectarines? or Tangelos? These are hybrids, developed by the same type of scientist that is working on vegetable varieties for fun or profit. Do you like sugar snap peas? or stringless green beans? Every single food you eat is a hybrid, as are you yourself.

Agri-business has been working very hard to make money with patented hybrids and GMOs. We've heard the stories of GMO seeds that wander onto neighboring farms resulting in lawsuits and farmers who can't save seed from their corn because it is patented. This stuff scares me. But let's keep big agribusiness and backyard vegetable growing clearly separated in this particular area. It's agribusiness' job to hybridize for longer shelf life, crops that ripen all at once, travel well, can be picked early and stored long, loaded into big trucks and have seeds that the companies can maintain control over. That's where the money is. It's true that flavor is way down their list of priorities. But let's not assign the word hybrid to this set of goals. Radiator Charlie developed and controlled his now beloved heirloom Mortgage Lifter Tomato for a long time to make money— thus its name! Different hybridizers have totally different goals for totally different reasons. The folks at some of our home garden seed companies are working to create new varieties for you and me to use in our backyards, where a tomato that tastes like heaven and has a shelf life of about 20 minutes is not a big problem.

Are you going to save seed from your heirlooms or let your seed supplier do it for you? Do you have the space to isolate varieties from each other? Do you know that different varieties of tomatoes have to be different distances away from their neighbors to get seed true to type? These are important details in seed saving. Get William Woys Weaver's incredible book Heirloom Vegetable Gardening and you will be inspired to try many varieties and techniques in your garden. Or join the Seed Savers Exchange. I have chosen not to save seeds for now and continue to buy my open pollinated varieties fresh every few years.

Each year I plant some old favorites and some new varieties. I love trying heirloom varieties. But my success with them has been very inconsistent, even sometimes dismal, and my gardener friends say the same. I love the colors and rich flavors. But I would never plant a summer garden without my favorite modern tomato hybrids. I love Early Girl both for flavor and its unbelievable fecundity. Once a couple of summers ago I picked 50 pounds off 2 Early Girl plants within about 15 minutes. I canned whole tomatoes and made sauce and paste. I have never had this level of productivity with an heirloom tomato. Maybe you have. How does your microclimate and garden soil and water chemistry interact with all these varieties? You find this out by trying and trying again. And again. It's hard to read a catalogue like Tomato Grower's Supply, where the hundreds of varieties are described in such glowing terms (they are trying to make money too). How do you choose? My most successful heirlooms are replanted every year- like Black Prince, White Queen and Persimmon tomatoes. And I keep trying different heirlooms and modern hybrids to give me the most chances for variety and abundance. They both have their place in my yard and have served me well.