Thursday, May 28, 2009

Tactical Seed Scare Mongers

Okay, dammit, I've heard, seen, and smelt about enough dammit.
HYBRID GARDEN SEEDS AIN'T GONNA KILL YA!

Seed companies take pollen from stable variety A and introduce it to the flowers of stable variety B and know they are going to wind up with hybrid C.
Now if you take the hybrid C seeds home to grow and harvest the seeds, the next generation from those seeds you can end up with different varieties of plants having traits of A,B, or C.
Ya know what, even if you grow only heirloom varieties, unless you take some really careful segregation steps or only grow 1 variety of that plant, you are going to wind up with a mix of cross pollinated HYBRIDS come next season.

So now what?
Well in a long term grid down, SHTF, TEOTWAWKI situation, if you start out with a broad genetic spectrum of varieties, over the years of saving and replanting the seeds of the plants that have the traits you desire, you will eventually wind up with your own specially customized highly tuned varieties that suit both you and the specific micro environment of your AO.
Ya that's right totally Tacticool fruits and veggies!

Okay, now back to the original point I was going to attempt to make, you don't have to plop down a wheelbarrow of Ameros at one time and buy one of those "Seed Vaults". If you do have the cash, cool, you might be saving money in the long run and perhaps they are specially packaged for longer shelf life. But please don't delay in getting at least some seeds stored away, and this years crops planted.
If you don't have a lot of cash to spend in one place and it seems that most of us don't, buy a few packages here and there whenever you hit a grocery store or hardware store, you will find that most even have some heirloom varieties on the shelf.

Now some will bring up the argument about GMOs and Monsantos terminator gene, these may be problems down the road but for the time being these things are being applied to commercial strains that aren't desirable in the home garden anyways. A further stress reducer is that just about any seed variety that I've on regular store shelves have been around forever and a day, in fact some of the varieties are even on listed strains in the heirloom "Survival" seed variety packages.

This war we are engaged in against the shape shifting reptilians from the fourth dimension is a war of attrition, and you must make any headway you can, even if it is bit by a little and a few seeds at a time.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had not realized that hybrid seeds could be used to grow plants, then you could use the seeds from those plants to replant. I always thought hybrid plants had seeds that were not biologically viable for a second generation. Have you been able to grow follow on plantings from hybrid seeds, yourself? I ask because I have found that actual experience beats dissertations in academic journals as a source of info.

Heckinahandbasket said...

I have grown my own from saved hybrid carrot and tomato seed.

The oft cried problem is that you supposedly wind up with "inferior" plants that don't have the exact same properties as what you planted the original hybrid seed for.

As I see it, you ain't gonna wind up with plants that are all that inferior since they will have in the mix properties that made the hybrid "superior" in the first place.

Both the Hybrid seed sellers and the Heirloom seed sellers tout the "inferior" line but they also each have something to sell you.

I should add to the original post that there are some hybrids out there that won't pollinate on there own, I haven't had this problem myself yet, but there is a way around this, plant next to a known open pollinated strain. The gardening book often touted by a large number of "prepper" sites Gardening When It Counts speaks of this.

Heckinahandbasket said...

Here is a google books link to the aforementioned Gardening When it Counts (hopefully it copy and pastes fine)

http://books.google.ca/books?id=lbohaJCxFnAC&pg=PA140&lpg=PA140&dq=hybrid+carrots&source=bl&ots=EG8n-3OYKt&sig=Mg9CVsBkj16BYeGCUzGL843H9XI&hl=en&ei=st0iSv3bJpCMtgPW1_GSBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5

Anonymous said...

That's worth knowing. In retrospect, I think what I read is essentially what you said, but in my mind I had formed the idea that hybrids would not reproduce at all. Thanks for the heads up.

Anonymous said...

Just stopped by to see what you had been up to.

Anonymous said...

Update time!

M.D. Creekmore said...

Interesting post with good points to ponder.