Why You Should Buy Hybrid Seeds

Let’s talk about why you should have hybrid seeds in your seed stockpile. In a previous article, we talked about stockpiling seeds, but we did not even mention the difference between heirloom and hybrid seeds.

Hybrid seeds get a bad rap, which is too bad. All the fruits and vegetables we eat today are hybrids from the original plants our ancestors started cultivating thousands of years ago. The apples we eat today are drastically different from their wild cousins. The same goes for just about everything we eat.

Heirloom

Seeds harvested from a heirloom plant will be fertile and will reproduce true-to-form. Which means if you plant an heirloom seed, the resulting fruit or vegetable will be just like its parent.

These are old seed stocks that have been around for decades, if not hundreds of years.

Hybrid Seeds

These are the result of cross-pollination between plants in the same group. The resulting fruit or vegetable will be a genetic blend of its parents and will have traits of both.

Seeds harvested from hybrid plants may not be fertile and may not reproduce true-to-form.

Plants grown from seeds harvested from a hybrid may result in something that looks like the original cross-pollinated plants. That is if the seeds are even viable.

However, there are from time to time seeds from hybrids that are viable and reproduce true-to-form. This is why we have our food crops today. One of our ancestors planted crops in the same group close together, cross-pollination happened, and the seeds were saved. The resulting seeds later became heirloom.

Why Buy Hybrid

Hybrid plants are typically more drought, disease, and pest resistant than their heirloom cousins. How resistant depends on the original plants.

Where a plant disease may kill off certain types of heirloom crops, hybrids may survive. This makes hybrids ideal for periods of drought, or areas prone to certain crop diseases.

Next time you are at the store and see some packets of hybrid seeds, go ahead and pick some up and add them to your inventory.

Kevin Felts

Founder and owner of www.survivalistboards.com My blog - www.survivalboards.com Hobbies include fishing, hiking, hunting, blogging, sharing his politically incorrect opinion, video blogging on youtube, survivalism and spending time with his family.