Showing posts with label hybrid seeds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hybrid seeds. Show all posts

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.