Heirlooms

This appeared in the August 27 edition of The Fish Wrap

Human mothers do everything they can to give their babies a great start and set them up for the best possible life. Mother plants do the same by producing seeds that have the best chance of germinating and thriving long enough to produce quality seeds themselves. The health of a mother plant has a huge impact on the health of the plants produced from her seeds.

A mother plant produces seeds that share her characteristics and also have qualities optimised to the conditions the mother experienced. She encodes her seeds with seasonal signals such as day length and temperature to ensure germination at the optimal time. This allows for a generational response to changing climate and other variances. She even produces variety in the size of seeds and density of seed walls to improve the chances of a high seedling survival rate.   

As farming has become more mechanized the desired traits of crops are changing.  Instead of vigor, flavor, and nutrient density, the traits desired are more based on uniformity of the crop to make harvesting and planting easier.  This is one way to do it, but it has played a part in the loss of genetic diversity in our crops.  Now the majority of crops planted are hybrids or GMO’s that you can’t save the seeds from for next year's crop and you have to go back to the same company and buy more for next year.

No matter what conditions you provide for a seed, that seed can only reach its initial genetic potential, but with each generation that potential can be increased, or decreased.  Saving our own heirloom seed, from plants grown in healthy soil, will increase genetic diversity.  Within a few generations, the plants may begin expressing rare and wonderful qualities that have not been expressed for centuries!