Why grow 'Real Seed'? We only provide Real, Open Pollinated seed. No Hybrids & no GM seed. Real Seed breeds true, so you can save your personal seed. But that is not the one motive . Hybrid ("F1") seed is the results of a cross between two totally different , but heavily inbred mother and father. Seed you save from these plants will both be sterile or a give an entire mixture of shapes and types, usually producing a poor crop. Only the seed company is aware of what the parents are, thus only they will produce that specific selection. If you want to grow it, you don't have any different source - good for the seed companies however not for you! Small growers should be in a position to keep their own seeds, selecting each year the perfect plants best suited for their own land and circumstances. Yes, there are just a few exceptions, but usually, the hybrid seed business has been a public relations victory over the small grower.

For example, you will soon see more and more hybrid leek seed provided to you. This is because the supermarkets have set extremely rigid limits on leek size, and the one way to attain this is through hybridising two inbred varieties, so all leek seed manufacturing is switching to hybrids. You'll be instructed that these new leeks are 'extra uniform', 'straighter' and so forth. But what about flavour and flexibility? People seem to forget that we wish to eat & enjoy these items - food isn't only a commodity! Despite common city myths, there is no such thing as a magic about hybrids. So-called "hybrid vigour" is the easy indisputable fact that good hybrid seed is best than bad actual seed, and that sadly much of the true seed you get now has been badly maintained. But good real seed - which admittedly requires time, care and persistence to produce and maintain - should, by advantage of the genetics of this stuff, be simply pretty much as good, and in reality rather more adaptable to completely different soils.

The important thing right here is that it takes less manpower to make the hybrid seed, so the wholesale seed growers are a lot happier to let the outdated varieties fade away. And as for warpseed, https://simonutrn77777.getblogs.net/, the cost of hybrid seed, this is one other mystery. Hybrids are usually not made by hand. Yes, they have been in the past, however not for many years now. Most hybrid pollination nowadays is completed by chemical sprays, not hand pollination, so hybrid seed shouldn't be any dearer than different seed. There could also be a slight extra value associated with the spraying, but it certainly doesn't justify the excessive prices and tiny packets some corporations are offering. Basically, seeds are now bred for giant industrial farms (which is where the money is) and you, the house grower, just get fobbed off with a couple of of the same thing. Modern advert copywriting sometimes tries to disguise this. So when you're provided something that's 'good for freezing', what they mean is that it was bred to ripen abruptly for machine harvesting & you'll get a glut.

Listed here are a couple of examples from different catalogues that we found: How about 'really uniform fruit' - which often means 'inbred for the supermarket, slender genetic base, could not adapt to your soil'. Or 'straight lengthy shanks' often means 'bred to suit the packing machine.' Or the very best one but - 'Leafless peas - straightforward to search out the pods' translates as 'a lot smaller yield (the plants don't have any leaves !) - but not less than now we've got rid of the leaves we will harvest them with a combine.' What a unhappy state of affairs that is, with advertising and marketing folks rather than gardeners writing the descriptions in modern seed catalogues. In summary, hybrid seed can certainly have advantages for the industrial-chemical farmer who needs to harvest abruptly. But for the small house grower who needs a great yield over a protracted interval, actual seeds are usually extra productive. This has been shown time and time again, and we predict that once you have tried the true open-pollinated varieties we have discovered, you will agree.

Although Ben studied genetic engineering at university, all of our breeding is by traditional methods only. On grounds of each safety and ethics we strongly oppose all genetic engineering and the patenting of plants. The subject could be very advanced, but the dangers are very simple. We consider that, without exaggeration, the release of Genetically Modified crops truly is a dangerous practice that threatens the whole ecosystem. It is solely not true that Genetically Modified crops will resolve third-world meals problems or require less pesticides. That is not more than promoting 'spin'. Genetic engineering is just not only a variant of what farmers and breeders have done for centuries. It is a totally new science that can provide very odd, very different and extremely unpredictable outcomes. It isn't 'pure' for a plant to have a fish gene in it, and there is no understanding what odd poisons the plant would possibly make because of finding fish proteins floating round in its sap.