Gardeners, Can you clarify something for me?

[farmerlor]

Interesting..

Ok, so... If you plant two kinds of heirloom tomatoes close together, they cross pollinate (?) and the next year a hybrid of the two comes up and produces, will it's seeds be viable for planting? Or would it be considered a 'mule' plant?

I've never grown heirlooms before..

No, the seeds are usually viable but the new product may not be something you want to eat. I only grow heirlooms and now that I've got my list down to JUST my favorite 12 I collect seeds.

 

[Farmfresh]

I have had this happen. Sometimes when you plant ONLY heirlooms which is what I do in my backyard garden you get volunteers. I usually let them grow.

Sometimes those have the BEST darned tomatoes you have ever tried. So then you should try to save a few of those favorite tomatoes and then plant those seeds next year. Doing this for a few years you can develop a strain all your own that will do better in your particular conditions and taste better than anything you could buy.

I had some saved seed from an especially good little volunteer to work on this for a while, but I unfortunately am not much of a seed saver myself and messed it up.

 

[ORChick]

All good replies. Only, if you want to save seeds you need to do a bit of homework. Every plant has different requirements about how likely it is to cross pollinate, how far away the next group of the same vegetable should be (and you need to keep the neighbours' gardens in mind too for some of them), the best way to harvest those seeds, etc, etc. There are several good books on the subject, and no doubt many online resources. Oh, and BTW, tomatoes are probably the easiest seeds to save. For the most part they are self pollinating, so you don't have to have the great distance between plants. But there is a little trick to getting the seeds ready for storage.

 

[FarmerDenise]

I usually try to get open pollinated or heirloom seeds. But other times it is better to get hybrids for a variety of reasons (mostly disease resistance)
A hybrid will not produce the same plant from its seeds. So if you want to save the seeds from your plants, you definitely should use open pollinated seeds for planting. NOT hybrids.

I save the seeds from most of my plants, especially tomatoes. We went out and bought all heirloom and a couple of others we liked one year. We save the seeds from the tomatoes we like and label them carefully, describing the tomato. Most of the time we get that same or very similar tomatoes. Tomato plants are self fertile and are often pollinated by wind as well as bees. So far we really like the tomatoes we have been getting from our own seeds.
We plant all our tomatoes together, sometimes even two different kinds in the same tomato cage. And we still get really good tomatoes, large yellow tomato - produces large yellow tomato, small red - produces small red and so on. Sometimes we get something different and that has been a good thing for us so far.

We also allow volunteers to grow. It such fun to see what you end up with. Last summer we ended up with a rather large (for us) watermelon that received very little water and all our pumpkins were volunteers.

 

[patandchickens]

What ORchick said.

It makes a HUGE difference what kind of veg you are talking about.

Beans and peas do not outcross hardly at all, and it is obviously quite easy to get them to set seed and collect it and store it.

Tomatoes outcross "some", peppers a bit more, but it is not hard to bag and hand-pollinate a few fruits to save seeds from. Same with cuke/squash type things.

Other plants either outcross a great deal including with wild plants (e.g. carrots) or only set seed in their SECOND year (carrots, cabbage, and some others), making it quite a larger and "different" project to get seed at ALL from them, let alone true-to-variety seed.

So it is highly worth doing some reading about the ins and outs of saving different veggies and deciding which ones it is realistic for you to tackle this year. Probably not cabbage, for one

Then, for those veggies, buy open-pollinated (non hybrid) varieties. And bag/handpollinate (or isolate) the varieties when necessary. That will provide you with a 'true' seed source for next year.

The other kinds of veggies, like carrots and cabbage, that you are not realistically going to tackle seed-saving from this year, you can buy whatever the heck varieties you want

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[FarmerDenise]

Here is a list of seeds we save with pretty good success:
Tomato, peppers (although there is some crossing, since we grow several varieties), beans (but we make sure to only save the ones on opposite ends of the rows, since we grow several kinds), millet, broomcorn, parsley, basil (again, we don't care if it crossed), cilantro, chives, strawberry (don't care if they crossed), sunflowers (love it when they cross), pumkin (crossing makes for interesting ones from the seeds), luffa, melons (don't care if they cross, makes for interesting new ones), dill, indian corn, pop corn,

That's all I can think of right now. We try saving seeds from anything we grow and see how it turns out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It is fun in any case. We are not too scientific about it.

I've grown flax, nijer, milo and an interesting feathery looking millet from seeds that I gathered from volunteers. They looked cool growing, spent time in a vase in the house, got dried and the animals were happy to eat them all.

Of course I save seeds from flowers all the time.

 

[meriruka]

Organic just means that the seeds come from plants that were grown in soil with no pesticides or chemical fertilizers and the seeds have not been treated with anything to help them grow.
Hybrid seeds can be organic, but saving and planting seed from hybrids will not produce a plant just like the hybrid the seed came from.