Did you know that seed saving is a fascinating activity that provides fun lessons in genetics? Gregor Mendel, the friar who loved peas, knew this...and you can pass the excitement of this scientific discovery on to your own children!
Saving seeds is a great way to avoid re-buying seeds each year, but did you know that you may not grow the same plant again?
So you’ve started saving seeds from your garden and replanted some of your upcoming pepper plant seeds, hoping they’ll be as spicy as before. Strangely, when you taste them, they taste sweet instead of spicy! While you may want to blame it on how it was grown, the honest answer may lie in the genetics of what you just grew.
Heirloom Plants
When grown and pollinated, certain plants create the same or very similar plant when you save their seeds and replant that seed.
Moreover, when this has been done and maintained over generations of seedlings, these result in heirloom crops.
You Can Save the Seeds from Heirloom Plants
Look at these tomatoes; they are pretty different from your grocery store ones, right? These are heirloom tomatoes.
You can grow heirloom tomatoes and save the seeds! When you plant that seed again, you'll grow the same variety of tomatoes all over again! Click HERE to see how!
F1 Generation Plants
Not all plants are heirlooms! Other plants, commonly sold in the grocery store, create different plants when you save and grow from seed. The produce in the grocery store often results from breeding two different genetic lines and harvesting the resulting seed. These are referred to as the F1 generation plants.
Fun fact - the bananas in the grocery store are all genetically identical. They’re clones of one another, so think about that next time you’re deciding between your bananas!
Ready for a genetics lesson?
Let’s look at the genetics of heirloom vs F1 Plants!
Heirloom plants have homogenized genetics. You can consider them purebreds because they will always produce the same plant from the seeds they produce when pollinated with themselves.
If you look at a Punnett square, it is like crossing a AA and AA plant. All four seedlings get an A from the “mother” and A from the “father”, so the seedlings will look just like their parents.
F1 plants are a standard part of your everyday produce. Our purebred plants can be crossed with another purebred but different plant to create an entirely new generation: the F1 plants. This is like crossing an AA and aa plant. All four seedlings will get an A from the “mother” and a from the “father”, so they are a hybrid of their parents.
Like how you may have your nose from your dad and smile from your mom, plants inherit qualities from both parents that we like.
The fun lies when you pollinate the F1 hybrids with themselves; they aren’t purebred anymore, so they can pass down an A or A randomly. If you pollinate an Aa plant with an Aa plant, you can either reproduce the grandmother (AA), grandfather (aa), or parent (Aa). Curious, isn’t it?
Mendelian Genetics
We covered the basis of Mendelian Genetics, which says that traits can be passed down genetically predictably. Gregor Mendel discovered this with pea plants. Our Punnett squares are a simple way of imagining traits. You could recreate Mendel’s peas and start cross-pollinating different pea plants to see what plants you can create. Based on what you see, you can begin piecing together the genetic puzzle of simple pea traits like color and skin wrinkles!
Heirloom produce is not only significantly different from typical grocery store produce, but it also represents a diverse history of crop genetics. While our current agriculture industry is focused on mass production, heirloom produce shines a light on individual characteristics that can be geared toward your tastes (literally). Color, shape, texture, taste, and even disease resistance are all traits maintained in heirloom produce, passed down to their new seedlings over generations.
Conserving these qualities is both an environmental cause and a tasty treat!
Discover Heirloom Plant Communities
There are online and in-person communities that focus on exchanging heirloom seeds. Sites like The Seed Savers Exchange create online communities where people can share their heirloom seeds. Your local community garden or Facebook group may also have a page dedicated to exchanging seeds that gardeners in your area harvested that year.
Learn More!
Want to learn more about heirloom produce and plant genetics?
Thank you for reading!
Please reach out if you have any questions or concerns by clicking here! Have a wonderful day!
-Leah Brooks
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