Nowadays, everyone seems to be excited about heirloom plants. But what exactly are they?
This subject most frequently arises when speaking about vegetable varieties. Heirlooms introduce you to mouth-watering flavors you have never known when it comes to tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, cucumber, broccoli, or any other candidate for your salad plate or vegetable platter.
Designating a vegetable variety as an heirloom is not considered an exact science, but it is widely considered to be a variety that is at least 50 years old, and whose seeds are colloquially described as “what grandma brought with her from the old country.” Those heirloom tomato seeds grandma brought from the land of her birth may have been the only variety of tomato seeds she ever knew.
But how does an heirloom variety come about? Let’s say you see a volunteer tomato plant sprout in your garden. Unless it came from an heirloom tomato that grew last year, you do not know its lineage. You harvest tomatoes from this volunteer and plant their seeds the following year. You harvest next year’s tomatoes and plant their seeds, and continue to follow this practice for years to come, after which your children continue the same practice until half a century has passed.
There is only one caveat you must heed for your tomato to eventually qualify as an heirloom: Never grow any tomatoes other than those that sprouted from seeds whose lineage goes directly back to your original volunteer tomato plant. If you allow your prospective heirloom to cross-pollinate with any other tomato variety, whether hybrid or heirloom, it cannot bear the stamp of an heirloom.
There is another group of vegetables that do not qualify as heirlooms, but also have preferential status when selecting seeds to grow. These vegetables are known as open-pollinated varieties. What this means is that they have been grown in the same manner as the heirlooms described above, except for less than 50 years. Let’s say you have a volunteer tomato variety that has incredibly delicious fruit (yes, tomatoes are fruits). You take the seeds from these fruits, plant them, and get more fruit with the same special flavor. Even if you have only grown this particular tomato for a few years, as long as it is isolated from other tomato varieties, it is classified as open-pollinated.
To make the distinction between these two highly prized categories of vegetables, it is often said that while all heirlooms are open-pollinated, not all open-pollinated varieties are heirlooms. Whichever of these types of seeds you plant, you can rely on them to be genetically stable, so that the crops they produce from one generation to the next will be the same as long as other varieties of the same vegetable are not planted among them.
The term open-pollinated is meant to distinguish varieties grown in this manner from hybrid varieties, where pollination is strictly determined by transferring pollen between flowers of two known parents. The hybridized crops contain F1 (F stands for filial and 1 for first generation) seeds and are those you find in seed packets of popular tomato hybrids such as Celebrity, Sungold, Early Girl, and Better Boy. But even if you plant nothing but Celebrity tomatoes, the F2 seeds in their fruit will grow into plants with fruit of unpredictable quality since they lack genetic stability due to two distinct grandparent gene pools mixed.
With the near-universal enthusiasm for hybrid tomato varieties such as Celebrity, why plant heirlooms? The answer is taste. Heirlooms are often sweeter than hybrids and may have what food experts call “complex flavor,” just as with heirloom flower varieties, you inhale fragrances not wafted from the common types. Other features of heirloom tomatoes include exotic shapes and colors, such as those seen in Brandywine and Pineapple varieties.
The strong point of hybrids is their disease resistance and reliably vigorous growth. Just as canine mutts or mixes are often tougher and less disease-prone than purebreds, hybrid vegetable varieties are less delicate than heirlooms. This is easily understood since two gene pools are better than one when it comes to adaptability to diverse environmental stressors. On certain packets of hybrid tomato and pepper seeds, you will find VFN, indicating resistance to Verticillium (V) and Fusarium (F) fungi and nematodes (N), which are microscopic, worm-like parasitic creatures that live in the soil and feed on roots.
If you do opt to grow heirlooms, the most disease-resistant will be those created in Southern California. Heirlooms that come from New England will be better adapted to the environment in that part of the country, whereas those developed locally will have proved their ability to thrive under our specific growing conditions. Incidentally, if you want to get the best of both categories of vegetables, plant hylooms — hybrids between two heirloom varieties.
You may also have heard of heirloom or old roses, available by mail order from heirloomroses.com. These roses were either wild types or varieties bred before 1867, the year when the first hybrid tea rose appeared. Heirloom roses are notable for being more pungently perfumed than modern roses. As for vegetables and flowers, all seeds offered at rareseeds.com are either heirloom or open-pollinated varieties.
Reader response
In response to a recent column about Japanese maples, I received the following e-mail from Shonda Joachim: “I have been growing several (well, maybe more like 47) Japanese maples for about 5 years, purchased mostly by mail order. My plants are all in containers on the north side of my house, so they do get mostly shade. However, as the summer comes on, I end up moving the containers around constantly trying to keep them out of the sun, but it’s definitely worth it.” Another reader sent pictures of a Japanese maple whose crimson foliage had turned green and white, a phenomenon to expect when Japanese maples get too much shade.
The story of how seedless watermelon came to be was told in a previous column, which provoked the following e-mail from Hedy Buzan: “In my humble opinion, seeded watermelons are much tastier than seedless.” Most people, myself included, would agree with you. However, since most of us worship the god of convenience, we are willing to sacrifice flavor for expediency, it being much easier to chomp our way through seedless than seeded watermelon. Watermelon with seeds is sweeter because it is bred for sweetness, with the side benefits of being more fragrant and crispier/crunchier than seedless watermelon as well.
Do you have a story to tell about heirloom vegetables, flowers, or roses? If so, please send it along to joshua@perfectplants.com. Your questions and comments, as well as gardening successes and conundrums, are always welcome.
California native of the week
There are many carnivorous plants native to California, all of which grow wild in fens or bogs in the northern part of the state. The easiest of these to grow in Southern California is round-leaf sundew (Drosera rotundifolia). It possesses trichomes or tentacles with a sticky drop of sweet liquid at their tips. When an insect comes to snack on this nectar, it becomes trapped and is smothered by surrounding tentacles whose stems serve as conduits for the digestion of the trapped insect’s gooey innards. In our area, round-leaf sundew — and many other sundew species, for that matter — thrive along the coast but can also be grown inland. Use a 50:50 potting mix of perlite and peat moss. Grow in a plastic or glazed ceramic pot only and keep a tray underneath that is constantly filled with an inch of distilled water, the same water to be applied when watering from above.