Plant Some History in Your Garden With These Gardening Tips
Once you’ve begun growing vegetables in your own garden, you’ll find commercial produce just doesn’t compare when it comes to taste. Varieties found in the grocery store might be big and flashy, but they lack taste and depth of color. One of the gardening tips that can further shape the taste advantage of a home garden is the use of heirloom vegetables.
You may immediately think of tomatoes when heirloom gardening is mentioned, but there are heirloom seeds for a variety of vegetables, like cabbage, squash and a host of other options. You could enjoy the same taste in your squash that Native Americans have harvested for hundreds of years, or a pepper that thrives in the French countryside. If you’re looking for gardening tips to put a little history in your garden, then heirloom varieties are for you.
Heirloom vegetables taste better. Commercial seeds are bred for a couple of priorities, including their ability to ship without damage and their yield. What is often sacrificed is taste. Heirloom vegetables are preserved generation after generation and the result is superior taste and color that makes commercial varieties seem flat by comparison.
You’ll enjoy yield all season. Commercial vegetables are also modified to produce one big harvest so that they can be gathered up and shipped out all at once. If you’d rather choose tomatoes every week for your salads and BLTs, then opting for an heirloom will give you enjoyment of your vegetables all summer.
Gardening with heirlooms saves you money. Not only are the seeds less costly than commercial breeds, but if you save the seeds for next year, your cost of planting goes down to zero. Heirloom seeds are open pollinated, which means that you can replant them the next year.
Your seeds will be adapted to local threats. When you choose a local heirloom, your seeds will be naturally resistant to local pest and weather conditions. You can further bolster your vegetables against threats by choosing the seeds from your best and most robust plants each year for planting the next year. You’ll have cultivated a sturdy set of plants that are likely to withstand bugs and storms more than a commercial breed that was cultivated for another climate.
Heirloom plants provide more nutrition. It turns out that when size, yield timing and durability are the priorities for breeding, some nutritional benefits are squeezed out of the picture. Some nutritional testing shows a distinct advantage for heirlooms.
Heirlooms are a wonderful way to add a little history to your garden. In order to preserve the individualized care these varieties need, consider adding one more to your list of gardening tips: choose Kincaid Plant Markers. They’re sturdy, attractive and will never rust, helping you enjoy your heirloom vegetables year after year.
