The Best Commercial Vegetable Seeds

Genetically Engineered and Hybrid Seeds

• While seed companies strive to produce better plants and create hybrids that combine some of the attributes of one kind of a plant with another, or qualities from a different life form into a vegetable plant, this often creates problems down the line. Seeds taken from these plants quit producing viable plants after a few seasons, and the plants they do produce take on alien shapes that don't produce any fruit. Once you've seen this in action in your own garden, you won't want genetically-engineered or hybrid seeds again.

Heirloom Seeds

• Most people don't understand that when companies genetically engineer seeds they remove the seed's diversity, "which may lead to a catastrophe far beyond our imagining," says Annie B. Bond, green-living activist in her article, "Why it Matters to Buy Heirloom Plants and Seeds." Heirloom or heritage seeds are open-pollinated seeds and strains, genetically diverse, and passed down through the generations. Genetically-engineered and hybrid seeds only offer a few strains of seed types, while heirloom seeds offer a variety of vegetable plants and strains. According to Bond, using apple seeds as an example, most companies offer few apple types, while heirloom seeds have more than 10,000 strains of apples.

Seed Diversity

• Heirloom seeds allows diversity and some strains provide natural resistances to diseases. Evolution is part of nature, and plants undergoing blights may succumb altogether, while other varieties of the same plant won't. In Ireland in the 1840s, most of the potato farmers used the same kind of seed for their potato crops. Had they used different strains of potatoes, the potato famine might not have happened. Like the old saying, "never put all of your eggs into one basket," seed diversity is important to ensuring that all seeds aren't created from the same hybrid or genetically engineered strain.

Purchasing Seeds

• With a move to "green living" practices, many companies, including some of the larger commercial outfits, offer heirloom or heritage seed strains. Read the fine print on the seed package to ensure it has not been genetically altered or is dubbed a "hybrid" strain. Allow one or two vegetable plants for each vegetable planted to "go to seed," in the summer garden, to produce seeds for the next year's crops in abundance without you having to continue to buy that same seed strain.