Heirloom Gardening

[sleepyfairy]

Heirloom plants are those that haven't been standardized by scientists or commercial growers, but that come from small communities and are bred manually and naturally, so they may not be uniform. They're usually defined as plant varieties that existed before the 1940's when people began looking for more uniform produce that can be farmed for a bigger yield at the expense of taste (which is why I think any supermarket vegetable advertised as "GMO free" is a misnomer, but that's a subject for another time).

A lot of heirloom strains are dying out because in a lot of places it's illegal to sell the seeds (particularly in Europe), which is a shame because even though they tend to be more varied in output they're often much more flavorful than the commercial varieties.

Does anyone here focus on heirloom vegetables? Over the last couple of years I've taken an interest in it and this year I procured a number of seeds from one of the local mennonite families. The girl said that she's glad more people have taken interest in heirloom growing in recent years. They're only labeled like "carrot" or "cabbage" so I'm really looking forward to seeing what I end up with! If so, what do you grow?

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I have grown heritage tomatoes and zucchini, both of which did very well, though the tomatoes were incredibly slow to ripen. Heritage seeds are a bit limited in Australia due to our very strict quarantine laws, but there's still quite a few available, especially for tomatoes.

The problem with the heritage zucchini plants was that we ended up with six of them, and they went absolutely wild. We were supplying the entire town's zucchini needs at one point.

[sleepyfairy]

Sounds like a good problem to have if you ask me! I can only imagine how much zucchini bread you could have made! :D

If you remember what strain you were using, I'd be utterly fascinated to learn that.

[lilacsigil]

Cocozelle, Golden and the main culprit, Black Beauty.

Oh, we made so much zucchini bread. And muffins. And cakes. And pasta sauce. And pasta. And had a big basket of zucchini at work for customers to take whatever they wanted, once all our co-workers were saying no more!