Heir Apparent: Know Your Heirloom Veggies

You might have seen heirloom vegetables in the produce section of a supermarket. When you lifted a deep red heirloom tomato to your nose, it smelled of fresh-cut grass and maybe a little of your grandfather’s old greenhouse. Those gardeners who seek out heirloom seeds, however, are driven by more than either an appearance, a name or nostalgia. Each heirloom vegetable has its own history, which may extend over a period of many decades, a century or longer.

Growing Old

Julie Slevak, founder and co-owner of the Michigan-based online retailer Annie’s Heirloom Seeds, said there are basically two types of seed -- open-pollinated (pollinated naturally in the wild) and hybrid.

When you plant open-pollinated seeds and save the seeds from that crop, the next generation is going to be like the one before. When a seed regenerates over and over for many years and remains unchanged, or stabilized, it’s then called an "heirloom" variety.

“There’s an argument over what the age should be,” Slevak said. “Some say that 25 years should be old enough. Our company tries to set it at 50 years."

Toronto-based Gayla Trail, author of the blog You Grow Girl and several books, said heirlooms should ideally be even older than 50 years.

“The minimum is supposed to be 50 years that they’ve been stabilized,” Trail said, “but a lot of people are pickier and go for 100 years. I tend more toward the 100 years.”

Hybrids are created by cross-pollination of varieties to produce a seed with the most desirable traits. Slevak said they are typically created by large companies with different goals.

“They want something that transports well and that looks pretty on a grocery store shelf," she said. "But when you breed for those purposes, you typically lose other traits, such as flavor.”

Slevak said owners of large farms don't buy heirlooms. They are bought by small-scale, home gardeners who want those original traits.

"It’s also about the nostalgia of growing what your grandmother grew and remembering that taste, and generally they do taste better.”

Most varieties at the grocery stores are hybrids bred to have long shelf lives and tough skins for transportation purposes. They also have regular shapes for attractiveness, often at the expense of flavor.

Compost – An Heirloom Essential

If you're concerned your soil isn't rich enough to support an organic vegetable garden, composting is the answer. Julie Slevak of Michigan-based Annie’s Heirloom Seeds said any soil can be healed by compost. She relies heavily on composting to keep her vegetable garden blooming.

“We compost for fertilizer as healthy soil leads to healthy plants," she said. "There are lots of theories on how to make the perfect compost, but typically you just take lots of brown and green stuff and let it sit in a pile for a year."

Slevak said "green stuff" includes things that rot and stink, while "brown" stuff soaks up and binds in the stink.

" ‘Brown’ would be wood chips and paper, and ‘green’ would be leaves and kitchen waste," she said. "I also use animal manures, and dump straw in so it catches the smell. I just dump it in a pile in the yard, but you can use bins if you prefer. If it smells, add more ‘brown’ and you can turn it over to get it to go faster."

If you don't have the patience for home composting, Slevak suggests you add grass clippings to bags of composted cow manure.

"I also use grass clippings to mulch my garden and keep the weeds down, but you can’t use chemicals on your lawn if you’re doing that,” she said.

Organic Option

Slevak said heirlooms thrive best in the conditions in which they first appeared.

“My friends and I found that most of the heirlooms were developed during organic gardening practices before a lot of chemicals came around,” Slevak said. “They tend to taste better when grown in the soil they were selected in. If you use a lot of chemical fertilizers and you’re not thinking organically, the hybrids that were developed in those conditions will grow better.”

Heirlooms also appeal to the gardener and the consumer because there are many varieties available in comparison to hybrid types.

“Diversity comes with heirlooms in terms of taste, texture and color,” Trail said. “But also diversity in terms of different varieties being able to withstand different issues like pests or poor soil or a certain kind of climate conditions.

“There are more varieties in heirlooms than hybrids because hybrids are usually created by somebody, usually a seed company. Because that method involves time and energy, which is money, they don’t usually gear what they’re trying to do toward the home gardener. What they’re creating is geared more toward agriculture and commercial selling.”

Trendy Tomatoes

These days, heirlooms could be seen as something of a new trend. They appear in the produce aisles of major supermarket chains across the country.

“I think it’s a backlash against the blandness of the hybrids,” Slevak said. “They’ve taken them too far. They’re looking prettier and prettier, and they taste worse and worse. People want to go back to what they remember.”

For Trail, the trend is led by tomatoes.

“I think a lot of people get into growing heirlooms through tomatoes because they’re so radically different from what you get in a store,” she said. “Gardeners are also just excited to rediscover these varieties that are older and often come with interesting stories."

In fact, Trail says she will sometimes try out an heirloom based on its story.

"There’s an heirloom tomato variety called 'Broad Ripple Yellow Currant,' " she said. "It had been found growing in a sidewalk crack in the '90s and was discovered to be this old heirloom. I thought, ‘it’s got to be a tough one!’ There’s this idea going around that heirlooms are this fragile plant that’s susceptible to disease and that’s not really the case.”

Trail also finds heirlooms to be a highly economical choice since you only need to buy the seeds once.

“I can buy a pack of seeds, grow that out, then save the seeds from the tomatoes that I harvest,” she said. “I don’t have to buy another pack of seeds again."