Heirloom Gardening Tips

There's an antique craze spreading and folks everywhere are getting in on the action, though they aren't visiting auctions or antique shops. They're singing the praises of old seeds.

Living antiques are seeds that come from plant varieties as old as 50 years or more. As breathing organisms, though, they can't sit in jars or envelopes forever without withering and dying and that's where heirloom gardening is helping.

Seed producers develop new fruits and vegetables each year, mostly hybrids, which are hardy with good yields. The problem is that these plants don't produce many seeds and the seeds they do have generally create puny infertile plants.

Farmers and small gardeners have found a tremendous joy in planting veggies like the ones from long ago, thus spreading heirloom fever around the world.

The earliest Americans had no seed catalogs from which to order seeds sot hey relied on the seeds that they grew themselves to provide for the coming year's planting season. Each summer they let a portion of their gardens "go to seed" and then they harvested, dried and stored them in containers. Every year they did the same thing and thus provided well for themselves.

Then in the 1940's, folks began to get tired of saving seeds as it was easier to buy them from someone else. Companies started to experiment with seeds and developed hybrids.

During these same years, heirloom varieties began to fade away which eventually led to them nearly disappearing forever. But something wonderful happened when folks decided that they liked old food and gardeners decided to bring back older vegetable varieties. Many seed companies now sell heirloom vegetable seeds. Some of the more popular ones are the Cherokee Purple tomato, the Purple Podded Pole bean and the Jimmy Nardello's pepper.

If you want to grow heirlooms, start with plants like tomatoes or beans, but choose vegetables that you like to eat yourself. Don't plant closely related vegetables together, like squash and watermelons which cross pollinate and lead to disastrous results.

When you pick an especially nice tomato, try picking out the seeds after you cut it open and spread them on a towel to let them air dry. You can do the same thing with cucumbers and squash, but leave them on the vine until after the first frost. Beans should be left on the vines until the pods are dry and look old. Then you need only open the pods and take out the seeds.

Once your seeds are dried and ready to store, put them in envelopes that you have labeled with the correct variety name and the date. You should put the envelopes in a cool dark place, like a pantry in a basement. You don't want your seeds to become wet in storage, so make sure that their resting place is dry. Some people store their seeds in a freezer and that's okay, but the seeds should be put in jars to keep out moisture.

As interest in back to the basics gardening continues, hopefully the ancient vegetables will thrive and continue making history come alive. Maybe you'll become one of the many links connecting this wonderful heritage together.

Looking for heirloom seed sources? Write to:

Planet Natural

1612 Gold Ave.

Bozeman, MT 59715

http://www.planetnatural.com/site/index.html

Seed Savers Exchange

3094 North Winn Road

Decorah, IA 52101

http://www.seedsavers.org/Home.asp

Johnny's Selected Seeds

955 Benton Ave.

Winslow, ME 04901-2601

http://www.johnnyseeds.com/

J. W. Jung Seed Co.

335 S. High Street

Randolph, WI 53957-0001

http://www.jungseed.com/