Heir Apparent: Know Your Heirloom Veggies
Vintage Varieties Have Tasty Advantages
I think a lot of people get into growing heirlooms through tomatoes because they’re so radically different from what you get in a store.
— Gayla Trail, You Grow Girl blogger and author of Easy Growing.
You might have seen heirloom vegetables in the produce section of a supermarket. When you lifted a deep red heirloom tomato to your nose, it smelled of fresh-cut grass and maybe a little of your grandfather’s old greenhouse. Those gardeners who seek out heirloom seeds, however, are driven by more than either an appearance, a name or nostalgia. Each heirloom vegetable has its own history, which may extend over a period of many decades, a century or longer.
Growing Old
Julie Slevak, founder and co-owner of the Michigan-based online retailer Annie’s Heirloom Seeds, said there are basically two types of seed -- open-pollinated (pollinated naturally in the wild) and hybrid.
When you plant open-pollinated seeds and save the seeds from that crop, the next generation is going to be like the one before. When a seed regenerates over and over for many years and remains unchanged, or stabilized, it’s then called an "heirloom" variety.
“There’s an argument over what the age should be,” Slevak said. “Some say that 25 years should be old enough. Our company tries to set it at 50 years."
Toronto-based Gayla Trail, author of the blog You Grow Girl and several books, said heirlooms should ideally be even older than 50 years.
“The minimum is supposed to be 50 years that they’ve been stabilized,” Trail said, “but a lot of people are pickier and go for 100 years. I tend more toward the 100 years.”
Hybrids are created by cross-pollination of varieties to produce a seed with the most desirable traits. Slevak said they are typically created by large companies with different goals.
“They want something that transports well and that looks pretty on a grocery store shelf," she said. "But when you breed for those purposes, you typically lose other traits, such as flavor.”
Slevak said owners of large farms don't buy heirlooms. They are bought by small-scale, home gardeners who want those original traits.
"It’s also about the nostalgia of growing what your grandmother grew and remembering that taste, and generally they do taste better.”
Most varieties at the grocery stores are hybrids bred to have long shelf lives and tough skins for transportation purposes. They also have regular shapes for attractiveness, often at the expense of flavor.
Organic Option
Slevak said heirlooms thrive best in the conditions in which they first appeared.
“My friends and I found that most of the heirlooms were developed during organic gardening practices before a lot of chemicals came around,” Slevak said. “They tend to taste better when grown in the soil they were selected in. If you use a lot of chemical fertilizers and you’re not thinking organically, the hybrids that were developed in those conditions will grow better.”
Heirlooms also appeal to the gardener and the consumer because there are many varieties available in comparison to hybrid types.
“Diversity comes with heirlooms in terms of taste, texture and color,” Trail said. “But also diversity in terms of different varieties being able to withstand different issues like pests or poor soil or a certain kind of climate conditions.
“There are more varieties in heirlooms than hybrids because hybrids are usually created by somebody, usually a seed company. Because that method involves time and energy, which is money, they don’t usually gear what they’re trying to do toward the home gardener. What they’re creating is geared more toward agriculture and commercial selling.”
Trendy Tomatoes
These days, heirlooms could be seen as something of a new trend. They appear in the produce aisles of major supermarket chains across the country.
“I think it’s a backlash against the blandness of the hybrids,” Slevak said. “They’ve taken them too far. They’re looking prettier and prettier, and they taste worse and worse. People want to go back to what they remember.”
For Trail, the trend is led by tomatoes.
“I think a lot of people get into growing heirlooms through tomatoes because they’re so radically different from what you get in a store,” she said. “Gardeners are also just excited to rediscover these varieties that are older and often come with interesting stories."
In fact, Trail says she will sometimes try out an heirloom based on its story.
"There’s an heirloom tomato variety called 'Broad Ripple Yellow Currant,' " she said. "It had been found growing in a sidewalk crack in the '90s and was discovered to be this old heirloom. I thought, ‘it’s got to be a tough one!’ There’s this idea going around that heirlooms are this fragile plant that’s susceptible to disease and that’s not really the case.”
Trail also finds heirlooms to be a highly economical choice since you only need to buy the seeds once.
“I can buy a pack of seeds, grow that out, then save the seeds from the tomatoes that I harvest,” she said. “I don’t have to buy another pack of seeds again."
- Photo Credit Siri Stafford/Lifesize/Getty Images
