The 4 Remarkable Benefits of Using Heirloom Seeds

Not sure what type of seeds to grow at home? You’re not alone! Many first-time gardeners have this problem, too. With so many garden seeds being sold today, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. From hybrid seeds to GMO seeds, you surely have lots of varieties to choose from.

But selecting your garden seeds requires great consideration. You have to keep in mind what your purpose is, and what kind of garden you want to achieve. Hybrids and GMOs may work for some people, but if you want the safest and most natural seeds, then you should definitely go with heirloom seeds!

Why? Well, first of all, heirloom seeds are 100% organic. They’ve been handed down from generation and generation for at least 50 years, without being crossbred or altered in a laboratory—unlike the GMO seed types.

No pesticides are used to grow their parent plants, so heirloom seeds are all-natural and ideal for growing the healthiest vegetables.

Heirloom seeds are also great for seed saving. Simply preserve the seeds from your harvested vegetables and you won’t have to buy new seeds every year! Now, isn’t that amazing? You can reduce your gardening costs with this practical method and have all the seeds you want for long-term storage.

For more information about heirloom seeds, continue reading these 4 benefits below. Please feel free to share this blog post with your online friends!

4 Major Benefits of Heirloom Seeds

1. Renewability. The first and most obvious benefit is the ability to preserve the seeds from a crop you like and plant them again next year. They will not be precisely like what you planted last year (this can be better achieved through vegetative propagation), but they will have most of the same traits. In this way you can become self-reliant with your own crops. There is no need to run down to the local co-op to buy new bags of seeds when you have collected your own.

2. Heritage. You are preserving and caring for history itself. Generations of growers repeated the process described above for millennia in order to produce the very seeds you hold in your hand. Growing your own heirlooms allows you to become part of this legacy, collecting and nurturing varieties that best suit your area and climate.

3. Flavor. Although some may dispute this, heirloom varieties of vegetables and herbs tend to have a better, more unique taste and quality than their GMO and hybrid cousins. As long as a species is kept heirloom, its genetic distinctiveness and therefore exclusive flavors and traits are preserved. However, once a species is tinkered with genetically, whether through hybridizing or genetically modifying, some of these great characteristics can be lost forever.

4. Choice. Instead of allowing a huge industrial agriculture company to choose which traits and values your crops should ideally have, you get to pick out next year’s crop yourself. Does one tomato plant have particularly juicy fruit and is especially hardy – you can choose to save that strong strain for future use. On the other hand, genetic modification implies no control for the grower. You simply must grow what the scientists choose to create in the lab.

Article Source: Nature Labs