Finding far fewer seeds to choose?
Gardeners are eagerly eying their mailboxes for the winter’s crop of seed catalogs, but they’ll find far fewer seeds to choose from now than just 25 years ago.
By one estimate, the number of commercially available garden seed varieties has fallen by 90% since 1981.
Older “heirloom” varieties, the ones grandpa used to grow, are disappearing from the lists. “Historical value and novelty are not the only reasons to take an interest in heirloom varieties,” says George Kuepper of the Kerr Center, a nonprofit educational foundation in Poteau.
According to a new set of free publications from the center, heirlooms offer much more than just antique accents for both home and commercial gardens.
The rich genetic heritage of heirlooms preserves traits that let them flourish in an age before widespread fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation.
Another plus: since they are neither hybridized nor genetically engineered, anyone can save their seed to plant again in the next season.
Two of the new reports detail the results from the Kerr Center’s heirloom variety trials.
Over the 2008 growing season, Kerr Center tested 30 heirloom varieties of okra, and twenty (along with six newer varieties for comparison) of sweet sorghum.
Growing Heirloom Okra at the Kerr Center: A Preliminary Study rates okra varieties for yield, date of first harvest, plant height, ease of harvest, fruit type and color, and attractiveness as landscape plants.
“Okra is one of the most popular and intriguing vegetables in the Mid-South United States,” Kuepper writes. “It not only adds variety, taste and nutrition to Southern cuisine, it is one of the more reliable crops that farmers and gardeners can grow in this climate.”
Results reported in Growing Heirloom Sorghum at the Kerr Center: A Preliminary Study include dates of seedling and head emergence, stalk height, and tillering. “Some heirloom sorghums were much earlier than improved varieties we’ve customarily grown and processed at the Kerr Center,” Kuepper observed.
The Kerr Center has grown sorghum for more than twenty years. During the annual Fall Farm Fest at the Overstreet-Kerr Historical Farm near Sallisaw, visitors watch the sorghum being pressed and “cooked” the old fashioned way.
The center plans more variety trials in 2009.
The third new publication, Heirloom Vegetables, Genetic Diversity, And the Pursuit of Food Security, explains how the loss of heirloom varieties sacrifices both genetic diversity and public control of the food supply.
The report identifies opportunities that heirlooms offer both for market gardening and home food production. It also reviews scientific evidence suggesting that heirloom varieties may be more nutritious than their more recent counterparts.
For more information call the Kerr Center at 918.647.9123 or visit www.kerrcenter.com. The site offers free downloads of these and many other publications on various topics in sustainable agriculture.
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