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Choices of Potting Soil

We’ve just been discussing potted plants on A Spot With Pots and I thought rather than leave a very long comment I would post about it here instead. I’ve talked about this before in a post a few months ago, and other bloggers have certainly discussed this too.

Peat Moss

Almost all soil products available for purchase are based on peat moss, and this is not without controversy.

Peat covers about 3% of the earth’s surface, and to date only about 7% of this has been mined. In addition, it can be mined sustainably, but this doesn’t usually happen. You don’t have to look very hard or far to find pristine landscapes ruined by peat mining in Ireland, England, Holland, Canada and many other countries.

Peat is a huge and important natural resource, but like many other things we don’t seem to be able to reconcile commercial and environmental issues with it’s use.

The majority of peat seems to be used by industry. Finland generates 2.6% of their electricity by burning peat. Nearly all flower bulbs grown in Holland are covered with a layer of peat to protect them from winter weather. Peat is used commercially in many other ways.

Peat is also important to many indigenous communities. For example, I was in Estonia a few years ago, where I was shown what I was told was a sustainable mining operation for peat used both for heating homes in the winter and for export. I was also told that the operation was very important economically for the region.

Lack of environmental sensitivity in the industry prompts a lot of people to speak out against using it in the garden, but as gardeners what’s really the best thing for us to do?

Commercial Peat Alternatives

Quick to capitalize on the fear people have that using peat damages the environment, peat alternatives have become more available. This is the same logic that people who are afraid of sugar should drink diet Coke, or if you are afraid of getting killed in a traffic accident you should drive a safer vehicle like an SUV.

I’m not going to deny there is environmental damage from mining peat, or that you may prevent some of this damage by using a peat alternative, but I think there are few real reasons to think expensive alternatives are any better.

One of the most common peat alternatives is called coir (pronounced koy-er), a patented byproduct of the coconut industry. There’s little doubt the coconut industry generates a lot of pollution from improperly disposed of coconut shells. Will you do any favors for the environment by paying for a very small percentage of this waste to be processed into a peat alternative, then shipped from Sri Lanka where it is made all the way to your garden? Is there some reason the coconut industry can’t process and dispose of it properly locally? It’s a choice everyone has to make for themselves, but I suggest putting the matter into some perspective.

Compost is often available for purchase as a peat alternative, and is worth considering, but the quality of this is often much lower than what you make yourself. Purchased compost is often made with waste collected by local municipalities (councils), often containing a lot of contaminants. Purchased compost is usually best used for flowers instead of vegetables.

Homemade Peat Alternatives

One of the best peat alternatives is homemade compost, zero airmiles and it’s your own recycled waste.

There are three common problems with using compost. The first is many people don’t consider compost clean enough for indoor use. I don’t have any problems with it personally, but it is an issue for many people. The second problem is compost contains a lot of microorganisms, and young seedlings may be killed by these. This is called ‘damping off’. For this reason homemade compost shouldn’t be used as a seed starting mix. The third problem is it’s often not possible to make enough.

I personally use a combination of homemade compost and purchased peat. As little as 25% compost is usually sufficient to ensure there are enough nutrients in the mix, but more is better and I try to use 100% compost if I have enough available. This often results in a mixture that is too acidic for many plants, and requires the addition of some lime.

Being a Good Consumer

Regardless if you buy peat or peat alternatives, remember you are buying a natural resource that shouldn’t be wasted. Like any other agricultural product, try to buy locally and as direct from the producer as possible. If you are buying it from the garden center, you probably won’t have any choice in this. Above all consider alternatives you may already have, like normal dirt or homemade compost. Also try to reuse or recycle potting soil when possible.

Always keep in mind there is more profit for any store if you buy a processed product, and this is what they will always try to sell you. Peat based potting soil is a perfect example of this. There are not enough nutrients for plants in plain peat moss, but by taking plain peat moss and adding a few cents of chemical fertilizer and a fancy label with a brand name, it can be sold at a huge markup. This is exactly what nearly all commercial potting soil is. Some have sand, compost or other things added, but by reading the list of ingredients on the label you can almost always buy the individual ingredients and make it yourself for much less money. If you are an organic gardener make sure any commercial potting soil you buy is clearly labeled organic! Making it yourself is the best way to make sure it only has what you want in it.

I often have the problem here in Amsterdam that I can’t buy plain peat moss in the right season. Garden centers know they are competing with people making their own mixes with homemade compost, so they just don’t sell plain peat moss in the spring and summer. Since it is used by gardeners growing flower bulbs, it’s often available in the fall, so I usually have to buy it out of season and store it.

Peat moss is an important natural resource for gardeners, but it’s cheap and unpatented, putting a lot of pressure on retail outlets to wean us off and onto more expensive and patented alternatives like potting soil mixes and peat alternatives. For this reason, the day may come where plain peat moss is simply no longer available for purchase.

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The White Lions of Timbavati

White Lion

Mike on Planb recently posted about this magnificent lion, who’s home is Timbavati, a region near Kruger National Park in South Africa. On a visit to that area 10 or so years ago I remember the story of these lions being told to me then. They are very important spiritually to the people of the area, and for more than 12 years have been extinct in their natural habitat.

Prized by trophy hunters, circuses and animal collectors they have all been killed or used in captive breeding programs.

One of the most controversial aspects of these breeding programs is their use in canned-hunting programs, where rich tourists are given a gun and a lion in specially prepared setting, then offered the chance to shoot their own trophy to take home. Some tourists are reported to pay up to US$70,000 for this privilege, and it’s a multi-million dollar a year industry.

The color of this lion is owed to one recessive gene, and otherwise they are a common species. This means as a species they have no special domestic or international legal protections.

In March of this year a small colony of these lions were reintroduced into their natural habitat, and are slowly becoming re-established. Full establishment of this lion in it’s natural habitat looks set to be a hard battle in the long run, and your financial support would be much appreciated.

For the full story see Mike’s detailed post (link above) or the Global White Lion Protection Trust website.

I also join Mike in encouraging other bloggers to help spread the word by writing about this and/or linking to this post, Mike’s post and the Global White Lion Protection Trust website.

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Biodiversity Begins at Home

No sooner did it arrive did it seem to have been forgotten. On Thursday the UN report, Geo-4, was released. This is the most comprehensive report to date about the state of the world’s global environment. Its 572 pages were written by 390 specialists and reviewed by more than 1000 others. The news was not good.

Decline of fish stocks, degradation of farm land, unsustainable pressure on resources, dwindling supplies of fresh water for people and ecosystems were among the points made in the report.

Two recurring points made in the report were loss of biodiversity and unsustainable agriculture. Thirty crops dominate agriculture and provide about 90% of the world’s calorie intake. Two thirds of the world’s population depend on the input of nitrogen based fertilizers for their food supply. You may wonder what this has to do with home gardening, and I’m going to tell you.

As most of my regular readers know already, many things changed after WWII in both gardening and agriculture. Before this time, there was not a lot of difference between home gardening and farming. Both farmers and gardeners generally saved and traded their own seeds, and while seed companies did exist then they only sold Open Pollinated (OP) seeds that were suitable for seed saving.

There was no need for nitrogen based fertilizers (which were originally created as a means for recycling the stockpiles of chemical weapons that existed after WWII), because people used their own compost and rotated crops that used nitrogen with ones like beans that fixed nitrogen into the ground. Pests and plant diseases that now require the application of pesticides weren’t usually a problem, because crop rotation meant the same plants didn’t play host to these problems from one year to the next, and a healthy garden usually meant beneficial insects would establish themselves to combat crop pests.

After WWII, all over the world, there were major changes in the way food was grown and we were all taught to believe these changes were beneficial. While there were some benefits, mostly these changes were all about creating new farming methods and plant varieties so that farmers could be made dependent on products like seeds and pesticides produced by corporations. Any objections to how everything worked fell mostly on deaf ears, because massive government subsidies meant everyone came out ahead financially anyway.

Initially, there was simply a divergence between gardening and farming, but soon gardeners were encouraged to take advantage of these supposed benefits too. Pesticides and fertilizers were made available to home gardeners, together with the seeds of the new varieties being developed. The seed and chemical companies quickly discovered they could very effectively promote their products with the ‘what if’ scenario. What if you need fertilizer and don’t use it? You better use fertilizer just in case! Most people after they use fertilizer don’t have the slightest idea if it was needed, or what the benefits were. The same logic applies to pesticides – what if you get a disease or insect pests and you haven’t used the right pesticides? Better use them all, just in case. In this way huge amounts of unnecessary products are used in home gardens every year!

In this way too, many gardeners find themselves under a lot of pressure from fellow gardeners who don’t know better, who encourage the use of these products to one another, or sometimes promote ‘organic’ alternatives to these unnecessary products. All this is just free advertising for the chemical companies!

Seed companies only make money if you buy seeds, they don’t make money if you save and trade seeds with other gardeners. Seed companies have the fundamental problem that they have seeds developed for farmers, and the systems of pesticides and fertilizers used, and they need to get home gardeners to grow them too. These are the seeds you find in most seed catalogs and garden centers.

The same ‘what if’ logic is also used for garden seeds. For example seeds with disease resistance for a disease that could only be an issue for farmers is promoted to home growers, in order to make home gardeners afraid to plant anything else. Quietly older varieties of plants are removed from seed catalogs and replaced with new ones, that are supposedly ‘better’ than the inferior old ones. In this way seed companies that offer more new varieties are supposed to make you feel better about buying seeds from them, because what if you accidentally bought an older variety that was inferior somehow. After all, gardeners are supposed to feel excited about getting seeds for the newest varieties of plants to try in their garden.

What’s astonishing is how successful this system of marketing has been over the years in selling seeds to home gardeners. If the seeds of a particular variety of plant aren’t saved and periodically replanted, the variety is just lost. This is because seeds only stay viable for a few years. This period of viability can be extended with techniques like freezing the seeds, but nothing lasts forever. It’s been estimated that in this way, about 70% of the food plant varieties have been lost since WWII, and many more are still lost every year. Even seed banks, tasked with preserving these varieties, have only managed to save a tiny fraction of what used to exist.

Together with this lost of biodiversity is the loss of gardeners who know how these old gardening systems worked, and who are experienced with traditional breeding and seed saving techniques. Even university agriculture programs don’t usually teach these techniques, because they aren’t considered important for modern agriculture.

In recent years reductions in government subsidies have put a much bigger squeeze on farmers financially, who because of local laws and international ‘free trade’ treaties are forced to first buy expensive seeds and chemicals, then sell them the resulting crops below their own costs. Loans are often used to cover the financial short falls, driving farmers into an ever growing cycle of poverty and debt. This has led very large numbers of farmers in India, Australia and many other places to kill themselves in order to escape their debt. Very agressive methods are being used to promote new hybrid rice varieties in Asia for the sole purpose of squeezing farmers financially and leaving them dependent on seed and chemical companies.

So this is all pretty heavy news.  What can you as a home gardener do to help the situation?

For seed and chemical companies, the only solution to the world’s agriculture problems will be new varieties of seeds, pesticides and fertilizers. Going back to old varieties of plants will never be an option, and indeed since these older varieties compete with the newer varieties, seed and chemical companies want to see the older varieties disappear.

As a home gardener, you can play steward to some of these old varieties. You can learn some of these mostly forgotten techniques like crop rotations, seed saving and amateur plant breeding. These are the techniques that improve soil instead of degrade it, and increase biodiversity. Organic Guide recently posted on how some of these techniques are being proposed as a solution to the current Australian farming crisis.

Even if you don’t do anything besides learning to identify commercial varieties of plants and not buying these seeds, but rather using your seed buying money to buy OP varieties as well as support some of the few small seed companies that are still around working to preserve old varieties, you can make a big difference.

Growing heirloom and heritage varieties can be very rewarding, and once you get away from the 30 crops mentioned in the UN report as being responsible for 90% of our calorie intake, there’s a whole exciting world of new foods and plant varieties to be found! To see pictures of a few of them, click on the ‘Featured Plant’ link on the sidebar of this blog as well as having a look at these blogs:

Daughter of the Soil

In the Toads Garden

Of course with the excitement will come a few disappointments.

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Doing Good Things Without Spending Money

It was Michael Moore that said in his movie Bowling for Columbine that we are supposed to be afraid and consume. If you are afraid of crime, you should buy a gun. If you are afraid of having an inadequate car, you should buy an SUV. If you are afraid of being fat or unhealthy, you should buy diet or other special foods.

In this way, for many people, doing good things for yourself or for the world means spending money.

In fact, sometimes the best things come for free or for not very much money.

The obvious example of this is heirloom plants. Most of us realize, for example, you often get a much nicer plant if you get seeds or other propagation material from a fellow gardener than if you go to a garden center, or even a specialty plant shop and spend a lot of money. I’m going to depart a bit from the usual gardening topics, and offer some suggestions on how you can apply these principles to other things as well. In particular, I’m going to try to make some suggestions that won’t have a major impact on your current lifestyle.

Energy and Greenhouse Gases

There’s no shortage of things you can spend money on if you want to save energy or protect the environment. You can buy double glazed windows, hybrid autos, compact fluorescent light bulbs or high efficiency home appliances, among other things. Sometimes you can even get tax deductions or subsidies for buying these things. In fact, it sometimes seems we are all saving up our money so we can buy one of these things after another. If you buy an energy efficient car or appliance today, you can be sure in a few years time there will be something better to buy. If you spend money on new windows for your house, you can be sure you’ll have to take out a loan that takes years to pay off, and it will take ages to make up the cost in energy savings.

It’s always the official line. In order to save the environment, we need to spend more money. If it’s not consumer goods, it’s more expensive green energy or carbon offsets. Just spend five minutes trying to convince someone who is determined to spend money on something like this they are wasting their money, and you’ll realize you are wasting your time. It takes a very strong will to do something different, and to stand up to the official line.

Most of these so called energy savers have some things in common. They all involve energy to make, transport, market and dispose of. Things like compact fluorescent lights and the batteries in hybrid autos are made with heavy metals and other very toxic materials, and are major disposal problems. In addition, the energy involved in putting some of these things on the market are much more that just in the manufacture. You have to consider most of these items have companies behind them, with employees who have to drive to work and travel for business. In order to accommodate this travel roads and other infrastructure need to be built. Marketing takes energy too, to support everything from billboards to in store promotions as well as traditional media outlets, all of whom have employees who travel, and so on. ‘Green’ energy like biofuels, often take more energy to manufacture then traditional energy sources. The amount of energy that goes into things we buy is more than many of us realize.

Lots of people would argue the points I make in this paragraph above, but let me be clear I stand by them. Take the issue of heavy metals and toxic materials in products. Many people would say these problems are not an issue, because they can be recycled.

If you had a used compact fluorescent bulb, would you know where to take it for recycling? Not many of us do, or at the very least are faced with getting in our car and transporting it a long distance before it can be recycled.

Even if you do know where to take things for recycling, do you really trust they will recycle it if it is cheaper to dispose of it? Much of the technology needed to recycle things currently being sold, depends on technology that doesn’t yet exist. In this world of privatizations, corruption and the quest for profits, many things that we think are recycled are really disposed of, sometimes illegally and often in developing countries. Similar arguments could be made for manufacturing energy use, and in the real world the energy costs are real. It’s always better to not buy the product in the first place.

There is always an excuse why disposal is not a problem, or the assumption technology will somehow solve the problem for us in the future, but not always many people who acknowledge the problem really exists.

Most of the time you can actually save more energy if you don’t buy anything!

If you need to buy something new, like a household appliance or a car, you should always look for the most energy efficient alternative available, but as an alternative also consider something smaller, cheaper and simpler than what you currently have! As a consumer, you should always demand the products you buy are as environmentally friendly as possible, but never rush out to buy something you don’t need because it is marketed as environmentally friendly.

Also, consider the possibility of buying something second hand. The energy you save in the manufacture of a new item may offset an awful lot of the energy loss in having an appliance that’s not as efficient.

Cars are a good example of this. If you want to drive an SUV, and buy one second hand, it will be much less of an energy hog in the long run than if you buy one new. If you want to drive a hybrid car, buying one second hand will reduce both manufacturing energy and toxic disposal problems. Above all, think about how what you buy will be disposed of, and avoid buying something new that is toxic or that will otherwise be a disposal problem. If you are a few years behind everyone else in choosing what you buy, and buy it second hand, you can be part of the recycling solution rather than the cause of the waste and energy problem.

Thinking Outside of the Box

This is a very North American expression that means making bold and risky decisions, and taking a creative approach to problems. Often these decisions go against what everyone else is telling you is right.

For example, it’s been discussed recently that in the US that about the same amount of fossil fuels are used by cars as in the manufacture of food. In Europe a slightly lower percentage is used for food. The majority of this energy is used for animal products, because first crops have to be grown as feed for animals. The amount of energy in processed foods is also very high, again because first the crops have to be grown and then processed.

You can save a lot of energy by eating only non-processed vegetarian foods or locally raised grass feed meats, probably more than you could save if you drove an energy efficient car or simply drove less. Remember the true costs of these foods are distorted by massive government subsidies, that despite all the rhetoric about ending farmers subsidies, continue to be paid.

As an alternative to replacing all of the lights in your house with compact fluorescent bulbs, consider doing an energy audit of your house and try to reduce unnecessary usage instead.

If you have a 60w incandescent light bulb, and you replace it with an equivalent compact fluorescent bulb, it will use 13w instead. A large percentage of this difference in energy consumption can be made by replacing the 60w incandescent bulb with a standard 40w or 25w instead, perhaps even a 15w bulb. The use of timers or timed switches, can reduce the amount of time the light is on, and save more energy. Many people would find this a better alternative to the harshness of a compact fluorescent bulb anyway.

Many people would be astonished the amount of power their appliances use in standby mode. Many modern appliances that are supposedly new and energy efficient use less energy only because they have an on/off switch and can be turned completely off when not being used.

It can be a useful exercise to go through your house and turn everything off or unplug everything until your electric meter stops turning. When you go to bed at night, your appliances should not be using electricity without reason! Kate at Cider Press Hill turned off or unplugged everything and her meter was still turning. A lot of careful searching revealed the floor dimmer switch on her halogen light was the problem. You may be surprised what you find if you do this yourself. Troublesome appliances can be turned off using a power strip with an on/off switch, a cord switch, perhaps a hardwired switch to your household wiring or just unplugging them when they are not being used.

By using standard light bulbs but reducing the wattage and hours they are on to the minimum necessary, as well as turning off standby appliances when they are not used, you will probably save more electricity than buying compact fluorescent light bulbs.

After all, the bottom line is how much energy you use, not how many energy efficient appliances you buy!

Central Heating and Cooling

If you live in a very cold climate, there is probably little substitute to making sure your house is a weather proofed as possible.

Many of us live in a temperate climate, where heating and cooling are only needed briefly through the year. In this case, you should certainly deal with major problems, seal large holes and take reasonable steps to weather proof your house but there may be better alternatives to spending a lot of money on insulation or new windows.

First a gas powered space heater is more efficient than central heating where heat is distributed via water pipes or forced air. With a little planning, it can be easier to heat just a room or two by closing doors when your heat comes from one place.

Even with central heating, you can save a lot of money by turning off the heat in rooms when it’s not needed, and turning it down or off when you are out or at night when you are asleep.

It is true that heating up an entire cold house can take a lot of energy, meaning turning the heat down or off for brief periods may not save you much energy. At the same time, if you can turn the heat down for longer periods (6-10 hours) combined with only heating a few rooms, you can save a lot of energy.

Since I live in a house with several floors, what I like to do is turn the heat in the house as low as possible, and when I’m cold go up to the attic for a while. We have several large windows in the attic, that let in a lot of light all year round. This sunlight means the attic is always warmer than the rest of the house. In the summer, when it’s warm, I go to a downstairs room to cool off.

If you already have a functioning heating system, you shouldn’t go out and buy a new one for no reason. If you do need to buy a new one, you may want to consider these ideas.

The same ideas can be applied to cooling systems. If you need to cool your house, you can do it only as needed in one or a few rooms at a time. If you have a custom house built, or you are moving, you can think about having a room or two that you can shut off from the rest of the house and cool only when needed.

For many people in a wide variety of climates, a solar hot water heater is a good option. If you have a cold winter, you may need to drain it from time to time in order to keep it from freezing. If cost is an issue, and you are good at do-it-yourself projects, building your own is a real option. It’s also possible to buy a system pre-made and installed. A good option is to have a small inexpensive hot water heater and put the solar water heater in front of it. In this way, the non-solar hot water heater only operates when necessary.

Applying these principles to food

In the same way it’s possible to do good by not spending money on other things, it’s possible to do this with food too.

Again here the official line is we all have to spend more money on food in order to be healthy. We are supposed to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables, and depending on where you live there is other advice for eating other quantities of food like fish and dairy products. You never hear we are supposed to eat less.

If you are afraid of sugar, you are supposed to drink diet soda. If you are afraid of fat, you are supposed to eat fat substitutes. If you are afraid of carbohydrates, salt, meat, pesticides or whatever it is that you are supposed to be afraid of, there is food you can buy for a higher price that has a ‘safe’ alternative to what you are trying to avoid. The same thing is true with things we are supposed to need more of, for everything from Omega-3 to Vitamins.

By breaking food up into components, and selling us substitutes or enriched foods, food companies make a fortune and we eat more unhealthy processed foods. Food companies make even more money by selling us certified foods, like certified ‘organic’ or ‘Fair Trade’.

You can save a lot of money, and eat healthier foods by avoiding processed foods and chemical additives, and emphasizing simpler foods like plain fruits and vegetables, and small portions of starches like whole grains or potatoes. Many people are very happy and healthy as vegetarians, but if you do eat meats, use moderation.

Rather than buying certified organic, try to buy foods locally from someone you trust who doesn’t used pesticides or other chemicals or choose foods that don’t normally need a lot of chemicals to produce (see the list near the bottom of the page). In this way it will probably be cheaper, and you will support your local economy.

By eating in this way, you also meet the criteria of most of the widely recognized and credible dietary guidelines.

Above all, if you are not hungry, don’t eat. It’s not necessary to be afraid of your health, and buy and eat more food as a result.

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When to Grow Commercial Varieties

I got the idea for this post the other day when having an email exchange with a fellow blogger, who mentioned she grew some commercial/hybrid varieties. This is the 204th post on this blog, and mostly I’ve spent the last 203 posts going over and over all the reasons why commercial varieties are bad and heirloom varieties are good. I think 99% of the time this is true. At the moment I only grow heirloom or Open Pollinated (OP) varieties. In the past I’ve certainly grown commercial/hybrid varieties and I’ll probably do it again in the future.

There is certainly no reason to grow commercial varieties if you don’t want too. There are plenty of heirloom varieties to choose from, and lots of good reasons to choose them. This is more the point I have been trying to make.

Growing your own vegetables and other plants is a lot of work, and the point is not to save a small amount of money on seeds by choosing one variety over another. The small cost of buying seeds, is not the point. The point is to grow the best possible plants, and receive the maximum reward for the time you spend in your garden. This is always the goal of any gardener, and certainly my goal. I am absolutely convinced the best way to achieve this in most cases is by growing heirloom varieties.

The problem is companies that sell us seeds are closely tied to the ones that sell us food. They are the companies that have the political clout to force unwanted GM foods into our food chain. They are very powerful companies with aggressive marketing strategies. In particular they are very good at playing on everyone’s fear of wasting time in the garden, and promoting their products as ‘safer’, and therefore worth the extra cost. They also force nearly all retailers who sell their products to sign marketing agreements, forbidding them from making clear what plant varieties are heirloom or not.

This means if you want to be sure you are buying heirloom varieties, you must buy them from a retailer that does not sell ANY commercial varieties. There are not many retailers like this, and they make this clear in their catalogs or web pages. Just look for a policies or ‘about’ page that clearly states they don’t sell hybrid seeds. Companies like this that do exist are proud of who they are, and make this clear to their customers. There are some links to seed companies like this on the front of this blog, but you can find others by searching the Internet for ‘heirloom seed companies’ or something similar.

Why Are Some Commercial Varieties Better?

First there are OP and hybrid commercial varieties.

Some OP commercial varieties can be better than heirloom, because the supply of heirloom varieties is suffering from decades of neglect. In the last few years a lot more attention has been paid to heirloom varieties, and more and more high quality plant varieties are becoming available.

Some very common vegetables fall into this OP category. For example, green (sometimes called black) zucchini (many people know this as courgette) and a few other common squashes or pumpkins. A few varieties of tomato also fall into this category. In these examples, I wouldn’t say these are superior to heirloom varieties, but if you don’t find them boring there is no particular reason to choose an heirloom variety instead.

There are a few advantages to hybrid varieties, the main thing being they are genetically identical and therefore can be very reliable. In all OP (commercial and heirloom) there are genetic variations between the plants, more with some plants than others.

With some plants the genetic variation is so great a significant percentage of plants will fail to grow properly. Corn and some cole family plants (especially broccoli and brussel sprouts) fall into this category. While there are excellent heirloom varieties of these plants, if what you really want is a very dependable harvest, you are probably better off buying commercial hybrid varieties. Many people still prefer the taste of heirloom varieties, and in particular for broccoli many people like the purple sprouting or nutribud varieties. For brussel sprouts many people like Long Island Improved, and one of my personal favorites is Mezo Nano.

In a few cases modern varieties have resistance to diseases older varieties don’t have. For example some heirloom tomatoes are susceptible to ‘wilt’ viruses. This resistance sometimes works the other way around, for example some heirloom current tomatoes have resistance to late blight that modern varieties don’t have. Marketing also often over-hypes the significance of this, for example promoting a tomato’s resistance to the tobacco mosaic virus, which is primarily an issue for commercial farmers who grow their tomatoes in greenhouses. If you don’t have problems with wilt viruses or other diseases, then having resistant varieties is obviously not an advantage. It’s important to understand exactly what diseases are true risks, and which are the best varieties to address those risks.

Commercial varieties are generally developed for the convenience of farmers. While this doesn’t usually translate to convenience for home gardeners, it sometimes does. For example, many commercial varieties are ‘all at once’ types. This means they are genetically programmed to produce their harvest all in one go, to make it easier for the farmer to use mechanical harvesting techniques. Sometimes for home gardeners who, for example want to process food for storage and it’s easier to have it all at once, this ‘all at once’ trait is more convenient. For most gardeners however, it’s more of an advantage to have the harvest spread out over as much of the season as possible so the food can be enjoyed fresh for as long as possible.

Sometimes it’s not practical to save your own seeds.  Very common OP plants, like cover crops or some very ordinary vegetables, are just not worth spending the time saving seeds when they can be purchased very cheaply.  There can be times saving seeds is too difficult, for example many biennial plants require skills many home gardeners don’t have.

If you grow flowers, there are many types and colors not available in OP varieties. For example, many heirloom flowers grow large and fast, and hybrid varieties have been developed that are more suitable for smaller spaces and home gardens.

Reasons to Grow Heirlooms

Of course for most of the last few years I’ve been posting about the reasons for growing heirloom plants, but here are some of the main points.

Commercial varieties are boring! Commercial varieties are made for farmers, then repackaged and sold to home gardeners. This means you end up buying the same thing you can buy in the supermarket anyway. In the examples above, I said hybrid varieties of broccoli and corn might be better choices for people who want a dependable harvest. But if I want a dependable supply for commercial broccoli or corn, I can just buy them from my local farmer’s market and save myself a lot of time and trouble! There are much more interesting heirloom varieties available.

It’s too much trouble to get commercial seeds. Like I mentioned above, if you want to buy seeds and be certain they are for heirloom varieties, you need to buy them from a seed company that only sells heirloom varieties. This means if you also want to purchase hybrid varieties, they have to be purchased from another seed company! Why bother?

You are not in control of access to commercial varieties, in case you want to buy them in the future. The patent holders are free to discontinue or limit the sale of anything they want, in order to increase demand or perhaps promote other, newer varieties. While it is possible to save seeds from commercial OP varieties and give yourself some protection for this, it’s not possible to save seeds from hybrid varieties and the patent holders can keep the lineage of hybrid varieties secret, so it’s not possible for others to develop homemade or similar varieties. If a seed company discontinues a particular heirloom variety, it’s always possible for another company to sell it instead, or for it to be made available through the Seed Savers Exchange or similar organization.

With heirloom varieties, you can save your own seeds. Like we all know, seeds are not expensive and many people prefer to buy them each year rather than save them, but at least it’s an option if you want to. Saving seeds has many advantages besides saving money. When you save your own seeds, you can do so selectively from the best plants, thereby saving the genes for the plants that are best suited to your garden. You can also trade the seeds with others, possibly for varieties you couldn’t get any other way.

Heirloom varieties are rapidly becoming extinct! By some estimates, 70% of the pre-WWII varieties are gone, simply because people lost interest in them and didn’t keep the seeds. They will never come back! Of course it’s best to save your own seeds, but even if you don’t by buying heirloom varieties you create a demand for them that makes it possible for seed companies to keep offering them.

While the price of a package commercial seeds is small, the money goes to the wrong place. It goes to fund marketing strategies that are replacing heirloom varieties with commercial ones. The little bit of money goes to companies that have a virtual monopoly on our food supplies.