Heritage Seeds for Growing Veggies as Nature Intended Them to Be

Have you ever noticed that lately almost all vegetables taste like plastic? It makes you wonder if you are living inside The Matrix. The thing is, almost all vegetables that you purchase from supermarkets come from genetically modified seeds which are more focused on the look of the plant and extending its shelf life rather than the taste, and this is why these perfect-shaped veggies with vivid colours have a blunt taste, although I can’t exclude the Matrix theory too. Luckily, today there are heritage seeds for sale, also called heirloom seeds which you can easily grow in your garden and get to taste that old-school tomato flavour that you remember.

Heritage seeds are becoming an increasing trend among modern gardeners. These seeds are specially preserved from past crops that had certain unmatchable qualities such as flavour, colour, size, and so on. In order to qualify as heirloom, each year for the past fifty years, seeds are carefully extracted from particular crops that have been kept isolated from other plants of the same kind so that pollination is occurring only within the population. Also, pollination is done by all natural mechanisms such as insects, birds, and wind and this type of pollination is called open pollination.

There is a difference between open pollination and other methods of pollination such as hybridization. With hybridization or cross-pollination, different varieties of the same plant are deliberately placed next to each other and the result is a new type of plant that is genetically different from its parent plants. Very often the seeds from these new plants are sterile and in the case they do blossom, the results are unpredictable.

Open pollination, on the other hand, produces a plant that is genetically the same as the parent plants from which the seeds came from and the seeds extracted from the new plant will do the same next year.

This is why the plants grown from heirloom seeds are considered to be a “true” plant. They develop consistently with each crop and this is why they are passed on from generation to generation. Thanks to heirloom seeds you can experience the same vegetables that your ancestors enjoyed hundreds of years ago.

Gardeners grow heritage plants for a number of reasons such as the rich nutritional content, the unique flavour, some do it out of nostalgia, to carry on a tradition, to preserve certain varieties of plants and so on. However for most of them, the two main reasons are preserving them as a true heirloom variety and adapting a heirloom variety to their own gardens.

If you want to get your hands on heritage seeds, you can ask you grandmother if she has any, or you can do it the easy way and find heritage seeds for sale online from stores that are dedicated to preserving this type of food culture.