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Heirloom vs Hybrid
Topic Started: Nov 26 2011, 02:36 PM (898 Views)
Meggermeister

Does anyone have any opinions on the pros and cons of heirloom versus hybrid for gardening and not saving seed? We have been using heirloom seeds for the last two years and have had varying success with germination, growing, and production of veggies. We are thinking about switching to some hybrid- especially things that we have gotten extremely low yields of like peppers. Any thoughts? I know that it is important to save the heirloom varieties, but with also trying to garden organically and not use chemicals, it seems like maybe the hybrids would win out for bug resistance, disease resistance, etc. What do you do and why?
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themaster
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themaster
I'm making the assumption that your referring to native plants v alien

Whilst maintaining heritage is good, it should be realised that all plants are continuously improving themselves naturally over time, this is the wonder of evolution. Mankinds involvement in this speeds this process up, who's to say the plants themselves wouldn't get to the same point only slowly.
Disease resistance tends to be the true quest of the plant itself, whilst higher yields would best be described as the quest of Humans.
Simply put, we as humans grow plants, in the main, for our own use/pleasure, heritage plants have their place, but chiefly...IMHO...in back up to the ever ongoing plant improvement. Unless there is the chance of the original genome dying out without your help, I would humbly suggest you make your choices on the human needs level rather than the plant genome...themaster ;)
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Greebe
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True. I guess that hybrids would have been selective traits that were cross bred between various types of plants to get higher yield and or resistance to pest or disease. I would suppose that even what we would consider as a heirloom would have been selectively bred at some point before it was recorded.

Greebe
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