I would like to share my experience with seeds.
We use old sorts, this seeds are original seeds from primordial
vegetables, as they were cultivated in times long past, the advantages over hybrid seeds are:
Sort variety, and you better can collect seeds from your crops for future planting (If you use hybrid seeds this will be a problem).
Interestingly this old sorts are better reconcilable, especially tomatoes and pepper's.
I wonder if there is a connection to intolerance and overbreeding and hybridisation from plants ? Furthermore they look amazing … purple peppers, yellow tomatoes
and also in interesting shapes, but as aforesaid you don´t have to buy new seeds every year, and you minimize to buy genetically mutated seeds from Monsanto or other chemical multis.
We order our seeds from “ Arche Noah” , maybe in other countries non hybrid seeds are also available.
Here a link to the project Arche Noah:
http://www.arche-noah.at/etomite/index.php?id=52
For more information see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed
http://www.primalseeds.org/hybrid.htm
banjoechef said:
If you are attempting to collect seeds from things growing in the garden something to watch for is hybridization of multiple cultivars. For instance I am growing 5 cultivars of tomatoes. The seeds which I may take form them after harvest could be a mix of any of the cultivars together, so you can get some really funky cultivars and sometimes non-viable seeds. You can also experience cross pollination of things in similar plant families like broccoli, cauliflower, and romanesco can polinate each other to make wierd things like broccoflower!
If you like to avoid crossbreeding a tip for collecting seeds : select one plant or fruit and pull over a nylon pantyhose, so there is no hybridization between different sorts.
Happy gardening !