Hybrids build better fruits and vegetables

As you peruse seed racks and catalogs, you might notice that some seeds are touted as "hybrids." What are hybrid seeds, and are they really "highbred"?

Suppose that you had two tomato plants, one of which bore ugly but tasty fruits and the other of which bore fruits that had poor flavor but were alluringly red. Tomato flowers are bisexual and naturally self-pollinate, but if you ripped the male parts off a flower on one of the plants, you could dust the other plant's pollen onto that emasculated flower.

The resulting fruit would contain hybrid seeds. With luck, the chromosomes might have segregated and regrouped in such a way that plants from those seeds would bear tomatoes that were both tasty and alluring. A hybrid might also be bred for such qualities as pest-resistance, fruit size, and ripening season.

Non-hybrid, or "open-pollinated," varieties of vegetables and flowers are those that have naturally self-pollinated for many plant generations. Plant a seed from one of these plants, and the resulting plant will be just like its parent, as long as the parents flowers were not tainted by foreign pollen. The qualities of an open-pollinated variety were not deliberately bred into the plant; the plant was discovered already having these qualities.

Hybrid seeds yield more uniform plants than do open-pollinated seeds, which is important to farmers. As a backyard gardener, though, you might not want to have to pick all your sweet corn or cabbage all at once. Hybrid seeds also aren't for gardeners who collect their own seeds. Seeds collected from hybrid plants grow into inferior plants. You must purchase new hybrid seed every year, one reason that seed companies offer an increasing number of hybrid varieties each year.

An unfortunate side effect of the increasing numbers of hybrids offered is that open-pollinated varieties get crowded out of seed catalogs and seed racks. This limits the diversity of what we grow, whether on the farm or in the backyard, and makes it increasingly harder to get seed of some excellent open-pollinated varieties, such as Green Arrow pea, Italian White sunflower, and Belgian Giant tomato. Sseed companies dedicated to preserving open-pollinated varieties do help.