If you’re the adventurous type, may we suggest adding a few surprises to your organic garden? Heirloom vegetables are a great way to get started. While there’s no set definition for an heirloom vegetable (or heritage vegetable, as they’re known in the United Kingdom), the general consensus is that if a cultivar is a) open-pollinated, b) was developed the old fashioned way in the field, and c) was introduced sometime before 1951 (when the first inbred hybrid vegetables came to light), it can be considered heirloom.
Photo courtesy of net_efekt at Flickr.com.
Some heirloom veggies may seem quite odd by modern standards. We get so wrapped up in our expectations of what a certain type of vegetable should look like that we tend to forget that it took a while to breed our modern food plants to the standards that we now enjoy. For example, did you know that some heirloom cultivars of pumpkins are red, white, and even blue, rather than the standard orange? Similarly, carrots can be red, white, or black, and round instead of cylindrical. While a few unusual versions of both vegetables have made it into the modern seed catalogue, they’re rare.
Photo courtesy of John-Morgan at Flickr.com.
Tomatoes are another good example: some ripe heirloom tomatoes are green, yellow, or orange, or even tiger-striped! And most of us have seen orange, red, blue, multi-colored, or even black corn cobs, if only as harvest-season decorations. Until corn geneticists got ahold of them and tuned the corn genome to produce lighter colored kernels (because they taste better and are more easily digested), those colors were the norm.
Fortunately, most of the “steps” along the way to our modern vegetable varieties have been preserved as cultivars that you can still grow in your home garden. But why bother with heirloom vegetables? Well, first of all, they’re something different. Who expects a blue pumpkin or a yellow tomato? Second, the taste. You might be surprised by how much more flavorful an heirloom vegetable is when compared to one of its modern equivalents. Third, most respond very well to organic treatment. This isn’t surprising, since most were developed long before chemical agriculture became the norm! Fourth, it maintains biodiversity. You never know when we’ll need those genes carried by heirloom produce.
Heirloom vegetable seeds aren’t always easy to find, but if you dig deep into some seed catalogs, you can sometimes find an heirloom vegetable on offer. Otherwise, Seed Savers should be able to help.
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