Lot of stuff I’ve been reading say to buy around mid December when the seed catalogs come out, but which ones?
I usually just get seeds and plants from Home Depot, it’s done the job, but I want to find some nice heirlooms and/or varieties they don’t carry. Also screw “white label” seeds. But that’s another discussion.
So this last year I got some different seeds from Lee Valley, but I wasn’t a huge fan, still felt like Home Depot just under another name.
So what’s your guys favorite website or place to get seeds. And when do you find the best time to order.
Seconding seed savers exchange. Most (all?) of their seeds are open pollinated. For anyone who doesn’t know what this means, it basically means that you can save seeds to regrow the next year.
Many types of seeds that you can buy do not enable this because they aren’t true to seed, or in the case of some gmo plants, they might be infertile.
When a hybrid plant is made, the genes are basically unstable. Remembering back to learning punnet squares in biology class, the offspring (seeds) from a hybrid plant can have a different mix of genes from the parent plants. For example, your hybrid tomato bred from one parent that had disease resistance but bad tasting fruit and another parent that had good fruit but susceptible to disease would give you a mix of offspring that can be like either parent, the hybrid, or the worst of both parents. Sometimes, over time, you can pick only three “good” ones and make sure they are only pollinated by other “good” ones by bagging flowers and hand transferring pollen. With open pollinated plants, none of that is necessary.
Ummm… Boy… Deep breath
Zero GMO genes commercially available cause infertility. The only infertility GMO gene was developed by the USDA-ARS as a way to prevent the spread of GMO genes into the environment. Public outcry shot that one down, so now we have widespread GMO contamination in some species…
Some species hybrid production utilizes male sterility. For example hybrid onions utilized cytoplasmic male sterility. This is a naturally derived mutation that is passed on in the cytoplasm (mitochondria and chloroplasts). This DNA only comes from one parent an is an exact copy (put your punnet square away).
A different example of “sterile” hybrid is gynecious cucumbers. Cucumbers can be all female (gynecious) or monoecious (male and female flowers on same plant) . These are hybrids that are produced by by crossing two gynecious lines using silver thiosulfate to convert one parent to male bloom.
Both of these types will produce seed if crossed with fertile pollen from another plant.
Most hybrids can have seen saved from them except for triploids. Triploids like seedless watermelons are sterile because they can’t form gametes correctly. Diploid lines are crossed by tetraploid lines to created triploids. Triploids in nature is usually sterile (with exceptions of course like the the Amazon molly cause life finds a way).
An OP variety is a partially inbred population. In tomatoes for example. You can easily make these from a hybrid by saving seed for a few generations. The level of heterozygosity decreases by 50% every generation. So a F1 hybrid is 50%, F2 is 75% uniform, F3 is 87.5% uniform, F4 is 93.75%. This is where most OP varieties are. As tomatoes are mostly cleistogamous, no extra effort to exclude pollinators is needed
I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would chime in. Do you think it would be fair to say that for your average gardener, using OP seeds would make it easier to save them?
The process to save seeds is the same whether it’s a hybrid or OP in most species.
The difference is on the variation in the next years crop. By year 4 or 5 of self pollinating they have an OP (inbred). I honestly think more average gardeners should attempt some amateur breeding. We need more locally developed and adapted genetics. Since the environment, pathogens and pests are constantly evolving, we need to encourage our food species to evolve with them.
Plant breeders rely on landraces/wild types for genetics to breed new varieties. A successful breeder replaces the landraces in the commercial markets. They are dependent on the thing they destroy.
You might not know it, but if you purchased a pumpkin this fall, the genetics were massively influenced recently by an amateur breeder in Michigan. An experienced commercial breeder used his genetics to create many of the varieties on the market today (I chose the best and named most of them).
https://youtu.be/CGRBJwC08FY