Heirloom Seeds - Past and Future

The genetic diversity of heirloom plants is crucial to maintaining genetic diversity of the world’s food crops. Every time an heirloom seed is planted, that seed stock is regenerated, maintaining that gene pool.

‘When we plant a seed, we create a direct link between our ancestral past and our potential future. The seed we plant has travelled around the world, from farmer to farmer, from native populations to traders and conquerors to royalty and eventually back to farmers.’ – Ron Krupp 
 
Heirloom seeds are genetically diverse. The genetic diversity of heirloom plants is crucial to maintaining genetic diversity of the world’s food crops. Every time an heirloom seed is planted, that seed stock is regenerated, maintaining that gene pool. Heirloom varieties represent a reservoir of genetic possibilities. 

As Clive Blazey says in his book ‘Growing Your Own Heirloom Vegetables’, ‘heirloom vegetables are a gardener’s inheritance. We don’t need new varieties, because we have an inheritance 100 times more rich and diverse as the commercial market’. Every year seed companies add and drop varieties based on commercial demand. By growing these varieties in your garden, you are helping maintain heirloom, historic and rare seeds for future generations. 

It is impossible to know just which characteristics we will want in our future crops, so we don’t want to deplete any source of genes. As humans alter the environment, we will need food crops that can produce despite new stresses. 

Heirlooms are open-pollinated, which means they will ‘breed true’. When plants are open-pollinated, they can self-pollinated or are pollinated by natural means (insects, birds, wind or other natural mechanisms), resulting in seeds that are roughly identical to their parents. 

We can only imagine the history contained in each seed, both what had come before and what potentially may come after. Through the planting of a seed there is a magical connection to so many gardeners from so long ago. 

Each generation must decide what they want to preserve for those that follow. By maintaining our heirloom varieties we keep alive our reservoir of genetic possibilities.