Beginner Gardeners, Start With Hybrids!

I was worried when he said he was planting that tomato in a pot on his patio.  Growing vegetables in containers is supposed to be easy but I haven't had much success with it, myself.  I tried to warn him.  "But. But. Tomatoes need so much water!  And containers in general need so much water!  Are you sure?"  In reality, I should have known better than to give an Heirloom Brandywine to somebody who's never had a garden before, that has a nearly fully shaded yard, the one sunny spot a piece of concrete.   Brandywine tomatoes are humongous.  Big tomatoes need lots of water!  And this one was started from seed, late.  Half assed taken care of.  It didn't stand a chance.

Last year, like usual, I sowed way more tomato seeds than I needed.  We'd originally planned to have a plant sale to raise money for Forest Park Community Garden but as it turned out, we didn't have enough places to sell everything we'd grown and before we knew it, it was past time for kitchen gardens to be planted.  Desperate, not ready to compost the few I had left, I convinced my office mate to take one of the spindly leftover Brandywines.  Between the squirrels and his toddler thinking they were balls, I believe he only got two tomatoes the entire season.  It didn't produce very many to start with.  I still feel responsible that his first gardening experience wasn't life altering like mine was.  It got me thinking that, for new gardeners, rather than starting them out with Heirloom varieties like I did in the case of the spindly Heirloom Brandywine, hybrids might be the way to go, for three reasons.

1. They're prolific.  As a new gardener it can be pretty devastating to coddle a plant all season only to harvest a few tomatoes.  Hybrids are bred to be much more prolific than Heirlooms.  When you grow an Heirloom tomato, you go in knowing that whatever fruit you get will probably be amazing, but you probably won't get very many. Hybrids still taste good and they are consistent, heavy producers.
2. They're disease resistant.  Aside from watering, new gardeners, especially ones committed to organic gardening, are pretty clueless about how to prevent or treat disease.  And at least in my experience, Heirlooms seem more susceptible to them.  Hybrids are bred to resist the most common diseases effecting that particular plant variety. 
3. They're easy to find.  Although Heirloom varieties are popping up more in big box stores and I've even found some at my local grocery store over the past 2 years, hybrids are everywhere.  

As a beginning gardener, especially a tomato gardener, (nearly all of them are!) the focus ought to be on finding a good sunny spot, getting in the habit of regular and appropriate watering, proper staking and all that stuff.  A good friend of mine always told me that successes build on each other.  That is particularly true with gardening.  My first year, I bought whatever was sold at my local big box store.  And my garden was so successful that I wanted to expand it, explore new varieties, try out these Heirlooms I'd read tasted so amazing.  By that time I had enough experience under my belt that I felt confident I could take on these sometimes harder to grow plants.  I'm pretty sure that, had I started gardening with Heirlooms I would have been so discouraged by their production and my lack of knowledge of how to control pests and diseases organically that I may not have ever gardened again.  I grow mostly Heirlooms now but I always have at least one hybrid tomato because I know that guarantees me tomatoes in case all the Heirlooms fail to produce or die from disease.

This year my office mate has agreed to give tomato growing another shot.  Not only that, I've recruited two new coworkers willing to try gardening.  They're all growing in containers. I'm planning to give them each one Sungold Cherry Tomato plant and one New Girl.  Both these hybrid tomatoes should be reliable, easy to grow and prolific, even in containers.   I want them to love gardening this year, not to stress over it.  I want them to learn and marvel and feel gratified.  If my plan works, they will make the same natural progression towards those old delicious Heirloom varieties many of us experienced gardeners have.

I know the hardcore gardeners will likely gasp over me openly endorsing hybrids here, but I have given this a lot of thought.  My goal is to grow new gardeners, not one-year-gardeners.  And I believe that starting with hybrids increases the chance that a person will continue gardening beyond that first, difficult year.

As a new gardener, did you start with hybrids or Heirlooms?  Either way, what was your experience?

Where Do Hybrid Seeds Come From?

After reading mrbrownthumb's post about the trendy boycotting of Monsanto/Seminis seeds by us homegardeners, I decided to take his suggestion and call a couple of the seed companies I'd planned to order seeds from. (all the companies I order from are on the "safe seed list.") If you haven't read MBT's post, do check it out. The gist of it was, if you want to boycott something, don't be so quick to trust some random list of companies that supposedly don't buy seeds from big evil Monsanto. I'll be honest, I made the call to prove him wrong because I'm one of those chumps that just assumes people don't put untrue stuff on the Internet, especially people like gardeners.

So, I called one of the companies and sure enough, they are not Monsanto-free. The conversation was quite interesting but not as much about Monsanto as it was about hybrid seeds.

There's something that has always bothered me about hybrids but the fact is that I knew very little about them. Several times, my friend J and I have had conversations like "are hybrids are inherently bad? If so, why?" Here's the extent of what I knew about hybrids.

1. They are a cross between two different varieties
2. They can be more prolific producers and more disease resistant than open-pollinated varieties
3. If you save seeds from a hybrid, God knows what you'll get the next year you plant it. Probably nothing close to the fruit you saved the seed from and maybe no fruit at all.

As it turns out, most hybrid seed is produced in other countries where labor is cheap.

Many hybrids require hand pollination which means that developing them is very labor intensive. Each year, the male and female plants are grown in a very controlled environment, taking care to prevent cross-pollination which could destroy an entire crop. Pollen is manually collected from male plants and then the female plants are hand pollinated. During a tomato growing season, for example, the pollination period is usually between 1-1.5 months and requires 40-60 workers.

Most hybrid seeds are produced in Taiwan, China and India and then sold to seed companies all over the world. Yes, to many of the same seed companies listed on the "safe seed list." So, if the seeds you plant in your vegetable garden don't come from Monsanto, but they come from countries who pay very low wages for very hard work, is that OK? At the end of the day, we're growing our own food thinking we're saving the world when in reality, every time we buy a pack of hybrid seeds, it's like buying a t-shirt from WalMart that was made by some child in a third world country. There really isn't much difference.

It also occurred to me that marketing hybrids as "more prolific producers" with "better disease resistance" is all fine and dandy but I suspect that the seed sellers are not as concerned with our per-plant tomato yield as they are convincing us to buy seeds that we'll love and need to buy from them year after year (remember, you can't save hybrid seeds). It's sort of like a crack addiction. Because of the way hybrids are produced, you're forced to go back to the seed companies to buy over and over again.

This new knowledge about hybrid seeds has catapulted me into yet another moral crises about my lifestyle and the choices I make.

I'm not particularly against the idea of hybrids. To me, it's sort of like interracial relationships. And I'm OK with those, too. The problem I have is with the outsourcing of yet another product to countries who don't pay fair wages for work. I'm having a hard time seeing how this is much less bad than what Monsanto is doing.

I guess it comes down to what your core values and core pet peeves are.

I plan to continue to buy seeds from companies whose seed stock does not primarily come from Monsanto. After all I've heard and read about Monsanto, I don't want any of my money in their pockets. It's like going over those huge metal blades when you return your rental car. I can't go backward now that I know. As I understand it, this will become less and less a problem in the coming years because Monsanto has made it clear they are uninterested in producing seeds us home gardeners like.

My rationale for continuing to buy seeds from the few companies who I normally do business with this this. They are small businesses doing the best they can. And while I wish there was a lot more morality in business, I also get that making a profit isn't that easy, especially if you're in the business of selling seeds to the home gardener.

How can we be as pure as possible given all the politics of seed buying? Probably turn more to Seed Savers Exchange and other groups for our seeds. Or, at least start purchasing heirloom seeds then saving our own seeds each year so that we are not required to support Monsanto, or the outsourcing of seed production. But beware, I suspect the heirloom seeds are not produced by some little old lady on a big ole farm. How and where commercially sold heirloom seeds are produced would probably make us wince, too.

Wherever you decide to buy your seeds from, at least be sure to know what you're getting and where they came from. I found this paper describing hybrid seed production very interesting. Check it out.