Why heirlooms?

Why talk about heirloom vegetables? Aren't there hybrid seeds overrunning the aisles in the local farm store and ChinaMart? Don't hybrid seeds produce a huge yield and tolerate chemical fertilizer? Yes. They also grow uniformly in size and shape, develop tough skins to help them survive long-distance shipping, and they have extended shelf life. So why heirlooms?

Image credit: USDAgov

"If you are only transporting a tomato from the backyard to the kitchen table, you don't need a thick-skinned, tasteless fruit like the ones you find in the supermarket," Benjamin Watson writes in Taylor's Guide to Heirloom Vegetables. "Granted, any variety of tomato tastes better when grown and harvested vine-ripe at home, but why should home gardeners have to settle for the same high-test hybrids as the large commercial growers, who expect so much more (and so much less) from their vegetables?"

When I grew hybrid tomatoes in my backyard garden a few years ago, I could have bought the same tomato at the store, but it's tough to find a store selling Brandywine tomatoes, or Golden Bantam corn. Scientists will talk about how heirlooms do the crucial work of preserving genetic diversity, and I suppose someone sees the benefit in that, but the simple fact is that heirlooms offer more variety than do store seeds. And you can save seeds from your heirloom and replant them next year, enjoying the entire process--both the frustration and joy--of the growth cycle.

We have too many seeds. I'll bet 75 percent of these are worthless and wouldn't germinate.

For me, growing heirlooms is more fun than growing hybrids because not many of my friends can say that they're growing Forellenschluss lettuce or Alisa Craig onion. Heirlooms give old-time variety that's still prized today.

What's an heirloom?

While "heirlooms" are family keepsakes that you can't throw away, there isn't a universally accepted definition of "heirloom plants." The broadest definition mandates that a plant variety meet three qualifications:

1. Able to reproduce itself from seed.
Most heirlooms are open-pollinated, meaning that they grow true to type from seed. On the other hand, seeds from hybrids are usually sterile or grow a plant true to one of hybrid's parent forms. The exceptions to the true-to-type rule are those plants that gardeners grow from cuttings or roots, such as potatoes, asparagus, onions, rhubarb, and garlic.

2. Must have been introduced at least 50 years ago.
Fifty years is just an arbitrary number--some heirloom lovers go by a 100-year rule.

3. Must have a history.
This is my favorite part of heirlooms. A variety of pole beans that may have been carried to America on the Mayflower, or cucumbers introduced in Philidelphia in 1928, or green dent corn planted by a pre-Columbian civilization in Mexico--these are heirloom plants. Plants that have a history.

Myself, I'm planting Bull Nose bell peppers this year. Thomas Jefferson planted them at Monticello.

 I need to give credit to Benjamin Watson, who wrote Taylor's Guide to Heirloom Vegetables, for most of the information in this post. The book is great and you should either buy it or check it out of your local public library and start racking up late fines.