6 ms·

The return of heritage fruits and vegetables

63 points by gruseom 15y ago

gouranga 15y ago
Lets also not forget that the heritage varieties by nature are not hybrid seeds which means that seed can be kept from the plants and planted the following year. If you take most commercial seed stock it's hybridised resulting in the seed stock being tied to suppliers and not being replantable. without trying to sound like a paranoid nutbag from abovetopsecret.com, the latter is a serious risk to the food chain. The moment someone allows hybrids to be patented, we all starve. Monsanto are actively working on this. I've been growing about 200kg a year of non hybrid heritage vegetables for about 10 years in the London suburbs. Totally different to the crap they sell in the supermarkets.
- micheljansen 15y ago
  Any advice on getting started? How do you bootstrap (get seeds etc.)?
  - chadyj 15y ago
    Amazon has a large selection of Heirloom seeds, but there are many other niche clubs out there that trade the seeds globally. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=heirloom+seeds http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
  - DanBC 15y ago
    You search for societies aimed at sharing seeds. There are weird EU laws around selling seeds - any seed has to be on a list and many heritage seeds are not. Thus, people do not sell seeds, but sell access to a club through which you'll get seeds. (http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/members/seed_saving/introduction.php http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/members/seed_saving/introduc...) (http://www.ukabc.org/seedawrd.htm http://www.ukabc.org/seedawrd.htm) (http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/articles/psss-want-to-buy-some-seeds http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/articles/psss-want-to-buy...) I did some voluntary work on an allotment, and I met some of the old geezers working on nearby plots and we'd share potatoes and tomatoes. It was great fun, and we got some great food from it.
  - Alex3917 15y ago
    This book on tomatoes has gotten pretty good reviews: Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato There are a bunch of sites where you can get 300+ different tomotato species, and there are also some websites that list all the various seed companies from around the world. Also, the NYT just had a favorable interview with the author of Heart Of Dankness, a new book about growers who travel to exotic countries to find new landrace strains of marijuana and then breed them to compete in the cannabis cup. That requires a much larger commitment to the craft that just growing tomatoes though.
  - ticks 15y ago
    There are quite a few forums out there that do seed swaps/parcels for established members. You can often get rare varieties for very little cost, while passing some of your own collection on for others to grow. It is probably something to try later on, but worth joining gardening forums that do it (so that you can have enough posts) to take part.
- tsotha 15y ago
  There's nothing wrong with hybrids for commercial agriculture - we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them. They're tougher, grow faster, and yields are better. There are seed banks where natural varieties are saved, and you can bet Companies like Monsanto have a seed library that covers just about everything on the planet you can grow from a seed (or a bulb or a cutting or whatever). But for home gardening I stick to heirloom varieties as myself. They're harder to grow, but it's not like you're using commercial farming techniques. If you get a good variety you can trade with your friends. It's a pain to dry seeds, though, and sometimes you go through all the trouble and for whatever reason they won't sprout when you plant them.
  - IsTom 15y ago
    we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them We'd just eat more potatoes compared to wheat/fruits.
  - gouranga 15y ago
    We could grow enough with no problems at all. The issue at the moment is we throw food away by the boatload. We also tend to grow epic amounts of money crops and livestock and nothing else. There's plenty of land to grow non hybrids worldwide. To be honest I've found the heirloom varieties, especially tomatoes, easier to grow. They don't seem susceptible to the mainstream pest and virus infections. We use a dehydrator to dry seed. Works wonders :) I've seen a good 70% germination rate. We plant 2 seeds of everything per cell to guarantee success. In some cases such as chillis we germinate in sealed ziplock bags first.
    - JumpCrisscross 15y ago
      >We could grow enough [food] with no problems at all Productivity of American agriculture has "tripled" from colonial times, "the result of many factors, including use of fertilizer, and pesticides, introduction of farm machinery, development of hybrid strains, and increased knowledge about farm management practices" [1]. Switching back to archaic modes of production would mean regressing towards a time "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" (versus 3% today producing a domestic surplus). As the article linked to notes, we need to modify our practices in light of changing energy and ecological realities. A lot of promise towards resolving these issues comes from genetically manipulating our food sources. An essentially Luddite reaction that flies in the face of the broad opinion of the academic agricultural and food science communities isn't rational. [1] http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-grw85.aspx http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-g...
- tezmc 15y ago
  I'm not sure I'd say that most commercial seed stock is hybridised. I'm in the UK too and in my experience most varieties you can buy are still the kind where you can harvest seeds and plant again the following year. That said, I ignore the hybrid F1 varieties too. Mainly because I enjoy harvesting my own seeds and selecting the best (or weirdest mutations) each year that are best adapted to conditions where I live. Hybrids can be pretty expensive too and you generally only get a few seeds.
  - gouranga 15y ago
    Try http://www.realseeds.co.uk/ http://www.realseeds.co.uk/ - great people and very cheap and generous.
    - tezmc 15y ago
      Thanks for reminding me about them! I ordered a catalogue from them a couple of years ago but never got around to ordering anything. I'll definitely take another look.
      - gouranga 15y ago
        Good stuff - I recommend their 'Cherokee Trail of Tears' beans, 'Frise Vert Fonce' Parsley and 'Reine des Glaces' lettuce (which is the most awesome thing I've grown in quantity - I spilled some seed in my lawn and loads popped up so I left them as well!).
robotmay 15y ago
I'm a historical re-enactor, and one thing we get to have a bit of fun with is fruit & veg. Aside from sneaking totally inauthentic fruits into displays to see if people notice ("why that coconut floated across the atlantic" etc), we do have a few members who belong to a heritage seed club. One of my friends brought along some Victorian breed of plum (mottled yellow/purple), which I can honestly say was better than any other I've had. Glad to see them making a comeback!
- personlurking 15y ago
  While I'm not sure why this is on HN, historical re-enacting does interest the amateur historian in me. How did you get started?
  - robotmay 15y ago
    The natural environment of the re-enactor is the pub; you just have to know which one to loiter in ;) Actually I got started by looking for local groups near me. There are three main types of groups; battle re-enactors, living history, and the SCA. Battle re-enactors are generally larger groups like the Sealed Knot or The Vikings, who field quite large battles and maintain a pretty high level of authenticity. Living History is more about showing how people lived and explaining it to the public. This is generally what I do (though we also do fighting). There's a high level of authenticity and most people hand-make their clothing. The SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) is an American thing which is quite popular. Not authentic and somewhat closer to LARPing; it can, however, have some really dedicated authenticity nuts in it. Fun if you're looking for something less accurate. In all honesty if you're curious; just go along to any local re-enactments (<shamelessplug>if you're in the UK then you might turn up a few on my current project: http://daysoutnearme.com</shamelessplug> http://daysoutnearme.com</shamelessplug>) or search around on Google for some local groups. Their sites will be universally awful, but you can normally get through via email. It's great fun and a really good way to see various castles and manors without having to pay :)
    - personlurking 15y ago
eps 15y ago
Roses. I was buying roses not long ago and asked lady why they didn't smell like they used to. To which she literally said - "the smell has been traded for longevity." the same I guess goes for lots of veggies and fruits too. Crispy and brightly colored, but tasteless.
madamepsychosis 15y ago
On a related note: the UK startup Growington is doing a great job. http://growington.com/ http://growington.com/
bprater 15y ago
In a similar vein, I'm curious what thoughts hackers have about Monsanto.
- DanBC 15y ago
  Being able to destroy a farmer for unknowingly growing Monsanto patented crops (via contamination of an otherwise non Monsanto field) seems really fucking lousy.
  - jberryman 15y ago
    I agree, and have no love for Monsanto, but from what I recall the huge class-action lawsuit brought against them was recently thrown out for, among other things, lack of evidence that that was in fact happening to a significant degree.
- gouranga 15y ago
  Nothing but vitriol. The company should not exist.
- georgeott 15y ago
  Interesting... http://www.monsanto.com/food-inc/Pages/default.aspx http://www.monsanto.com/food-inc/Pages/default.aspx
- jff 15y ago
  They're the Microsoft of food: they create things, they have the potential to help the world, but their legal practices can be pretty shitty. I've got nothing but hope for the future of genetically modified food, I just hope that Monsanto can learn to relax a bit more.
_delirium 15y ago
As someone who's not too worried about pesticides (though I'm not 100% sanguine) but is quite disappointed with the flavor of many commercial cultivars, this is a bit more like what I hoped the 'organic' movement would've moved into. Some smaller organic producers do produce some tastier fruits/vegetables as a side effect, mostly because they don't pick them as early, but the larger organic producers use the same pick-unripe practices as regular agribusiness does, and more or less all of them use the same high-yield, watery cultivars. I would personally be happy with something in between on cultivars. It seems that with a heritage tomato, for example, the goal is to get some crazy, knobby looking things from the 18th century in various colors that are clearly different from round, red, commercial tomatoes. But I'd be happy with round, red, commercial tomatoes from less high-yield, more flavorful varieties that produce slower-growing, less-watery tomatoes, like what's grown by the better farms in Greece or Italy. Nonetheless I can see how that'd be difficult from a branding perspective; if you're going to introduce a new cultivar and try to charge more for it, it's easier if it's really distinctive in appearance.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  IIRC the chemicals that plants produce naturally to fight off pests are responsible for some of the flavor, so when you use pesticides that actually reduces the flavor somewhat because the plant no longer needs to spend energy producing those chemicals. E.g. terpenes, which are both insecticides and flavor molecules: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terpene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terpene
- joeyo 15y ago
  Unfortunately, large-scale agriculture optimizes for shipping and shelf-life and when organic producers grow large enough, they must do the same. Tomatoes are the classic example of this, but it's true for everything. For example, pretty much all the avocados available in the US are the Hass variety---because they have a nice, thick skin. But there are some really great tasting varieties that are mostly unavailable outside of Central America or the Caribbean simply because they don't transport well.
  - stephencanon 15y ago
jberryman 15y ago
I'll use this article as an excuse to point people to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov who set up one of the first seed banks, and whose followers protected it through the siege of leningrad; some even starving to death surrounded by bags of rice. Seeds in a bank in Syria were recently moved out of the country to a nuclear bomb-proof vault in Norway protect them from damage. Preserving biodiversity is serious stuff.

63 points by gruseom 15y ago

Lets also not forget that the heritage varieties by nature are not hybrid seeds which means that seed can be kept from the plants and planted the following year. If you take most commercial seed stock it's hybridised resulting in the seed stock being tied to suppliers and not being replantable. without trying to sound like a paranoid nutbag from abovetopsecret.com, the latter is a serious risk to the food chain. The moment someone allows hybrids to be patented, we all starve. Monsanto are actively working on this. I've been growing about 200kg a year of non hybrid heritage vegetables for about 10 years in the London suburbs. Totally different to the crap they sell in the supermarkets.

micheljansen 15y ago
Any advice on getting started? How do you bootstrap (get seeds etc.)?
- chadyj 15y ago
  Amazon has a large selection of Heirloom seeds, but there are many other niche clubs out there that trade the seeds globally. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=heirloom+seeds http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
- DanBC 15y ago
  You search for societies aimed at sharing seeds. There are weird EU laws around selling seeds - any seed has to be on a list and many heritage seeds are not. Thus, people do not sell seeds, but sell access to a club through which you'll get seeds. (http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/members/seed_saving/introduction.php http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/members/seed_saving/introduc...) (http://www.ukabc.org/seedawrd.htm http://www.ukabc.org/seedawrd.htm) (http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/articles/psss-want-to-buy-some-seeds http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/articles/psss-want-to-buy...) I did some voluntary work on an allotment, and I met some of the old geezers working on nearby plots and we'd share potatoes and tomatoes. It was great fun, and we got some great food from it.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  This book on tomatoes has gotten pretty good reviews: Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato There are a bunch of sites where you can get 300+ different tomotato species, and there are also some websites that list all the various seed companies from around the world. Also, the NYT just had a favorable interview with the author of Heart Of Dankness, a new book about growers who travel to exotic countries to find new landrace strains of marijuana and then breed them to compete in the cannabis cup. That requires a much larger commitment to the craft that just growing tomatoes though.
- ticks 15y ago
  There are quite a few forums out there that do seed swaps/parcels for established members. You can often get rare varieties for very little cost, while passing some of your own collection on for others to grow. It is probably something to try later on, but worth joining gardening forums that do it (so that you can have enough posts) to take part.
tsotha 15y ago
There's nothing wrong with hybrids for commercial agriculture - we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them. They're tougher, grow faster, and yields are better. There are seed banks where natural varieties are saved, and you can bet Companies like Monsanto have a seed library that covers just about everything on the planet you can grow from a seed (or a bulb or a cutting or whatever). But for home gardening I stick to heirloom varieties as myself. They're harder to grow, but it's not like you're using commercial farming techniques. If you get a good variety you can trade with your friends. It's a pain to dry seeds, though, and sometimes you go through all the trouble and for whatever reason they won't sprout when you plant them.
- IsTom 15y ago
  we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them We'd just eat more potatoes compared to wheat/fruits.
- gouranga 15y ago
  We could grow enough with no problems at all. The issue at the moment is we throw food away by the boatload. We also tend to grow epic amounts of money crops and livestock and nothing else. There's plenty of land to grow non hybrids worldwide. To be honest I've found the heirloom varieties, especially tomatoes, easier to grow. They don't seem susceptible to the mainstream pest and virus infections. We use a dehydrator to dry seed. Works wonders :) I've seen a good 70% germination rate. We plant 2 seeds of everything per cell to guarantee success. In some cases such as chillis we germinate in sealed ziplock bags first.
  - JumpCrisscross 15y ago
    >We could grow enough [food] with no problems at all Productivity of American agriculture has "tripled" from colonial times, "the result of many factors, including use of fertilizer, and pesticides, introduction of farm machinery, development of hybrid strains, and increased knowledge about farm management practices" [1]. Switching back to archaic modes of production would mean regressing towards a time "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" (versus 3% today producing a domestic surplus). As the article linked to notes, we need to modify our practices in light of changing energy and ecological realities. A lot of promise towards resolving these issues comes from genetically manipulating our food sources. An essentially Luddite reaction that flies in the face of the broad opinion of the academic agricultural and food science communities isn't rational. [1] http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-grw85.aspx http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-g...
tezmc 15y ago
I'm not sure I'd say that most commercial seed stock is hybridised. I'm in the UK too and in my experience most varieties you can buy are still the kind where you can harvest seeds and plant again the following year. That said, I ignore the hybrid F1 varieties too. Mainly because I enjoy harvesting my own seeds and selecting the best (or weirdest mutations) each year that are best adapted to conditions where I live. Hybrids can be pretty expensive too and you generally only get a few seeds.
- gouranga 15y ago
  Try http://www.realseeds.co.uk/ http://www.realseeds.co.uk/ - great people and very cheap and generous.
  - tezmc 15y ago
    Thanks for reminding me about them! I ordered a catalogue from them a couple of years ago but never got around to ordering anything. I'll definitely take another look.
    - gouranga 15y ago
      Good stuff - I recommend their 'Cherokee Trail of Tears' beans, 'Frise Vert Fonce' Parsley and 'Reine des Glaces' lettuce (which is the most awesome thing I've grown in quantity - I spilled some seed in my lawn and loads popped up so I left them as well!).

robotmay 15y ago

I'm a historical re-enactor, and one thing we get to have a bit of fun with is fruit & veg. Aside from sneaking totally inauthentic fruits into displays to see if people notice ("why that coconut floated across the atlantic" etc), we do have a few members who belong to a heritage seed club. One of my friends brought along some Victorian breed of plum (mottled yellow/purple), which I can honestly say was better than any other I've had. Glad to see them making a comeback!

personlurking 15y ago
While I'm not sure why this is on HN, historical re-enacting does interest the amateur historian in me. How did you get started?
- robotmay 15y ago
  The natural environment of the re-enactor is the pub; you just have to know which one to loiter in ;) Actually I got started by looking for local groups near me. There are three main types of groups; battle re-enactors, living history, and the SCA. Battle re-enactors are generally larger groups like the Sealed Knot or The Vikings, who field quite large battles and maintain a pretty high level of authenticity. Living History is more about showing how people lived and explaining it to the public. This is generally what I do (though we also do fighting). There's a high level of authenticity and most people hand-make their clothing. The SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) is an American thing which is quite popular. Not authentic and somewhat closer to LARPing; it can, however, have some really dedicated authenticity nuts in it. Fun if you're looking for something less accurate. In all honesty if you're curious; just go along to any local re-enactments (<shamelessplug>if you're in the UK then you might turn up a few on my current project: http://daysoutnearme.com</shamelessplug> http://daysoutnearme.com</shamelessplug>) or search around on Google for some local groups. Their sites will be universally awful, but you can normally get through via email. It's great fun and a really good way to see various castles and manors without having to pay :)
  - personlurking 15y ago

eps 15y ago

Roses. I was buying roses not long ago and asked lady why they didn't smell like they used to. To which she literally said - "the smell has been traded for longevity." the same I guess goes for lots of veggies and fruits too. Crispy and brightly colored, but tasteless.

madamepsychosis 15y ago

On a related note: the UK startup Growington is doing a great job. http://growington.com/ http://growington.com/

bprater 15y ago

In a similar vein, I'm curious what thoughts hackers have about Monsanto.

DanBC 15y ago
Being able to destroy a farmer for unknowingly growing Monsanto patented crops (via contamination of an otherwise non Monsanto field) seems really fucking lousy.
- jberryman 15y ago
  I agree, and have no love for Monsanto, but from what I recall the huge class-action lawsuit brought against them was recently thrown out for, among other things, lack of evidence that that was in fact happening to a significant degree.
gouranga 15y ago
Nothing but vitriol. The company should not exist.
georgeott 15y ago
Interesting... http://www.monsanto.com/food-inc/Pages/default.aspx http://www.monsanto.com/food-inc/Pages/default.aspx
jff 15y ago
They're the Microsoft of food: they create things, they have the potential to help the world, but their legal practices can be pretty shitty. I've got nothing but hope for the future of genetically modified food, I just hope that Monsanto can learn to relax a bit more.

_delirium 15y ago

As someone who's not too worried about pesticides (though I'm not 100% sanguine) but is quite disappointed with the flavor of many commercial cultivars, this is a bit more like what I hoped the 'organic' movement would've moved into. Some smaller organic producers do produce some tastier fruits/vegetables as a side effect, mostly because they don't pick them as early, but the larger organic producers use the same pick-unripe practices as regular agribusiness does, and more or less all of them use the same high-yield, watery cultivars. I would personally be happy with something in between on cultivars. It seems that with a heritage tomato, for example, the goal is to get some crazy, knobby looking things from the 18th century in various colors that are clearly different from round, red, commercial tomatoes. But I'd be happy with round, red, commercial tomatoes from less high-yield, more flavorful varieties that produce slower-growing, less-watery tomatoes, like what's grown by the better farms in Greece or Italy. Nonetheless I can see how that'd be difficult from a branding perspective; if you're going to introduce a new cultivar and try to charge more for it, it's easier if it's really distinctive in appearance.

Alex3917 15y ago
IIRC the chemicals that plants produce naturally to fight off pests are responsible for some of the flavor, so when you use pesticides that actually reduces the flavor somewhat because the plant no longer needs to spend energy producing those chemicals. E.g. terpenes, which are both insecticides and flavor molecules: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terpene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terpene
joeyo 15y ago
Unfortunately, large-scale agriculture optimizes for shipping and shelf-life and when organic producers grow large enough, they must do the same. Tomatoes are the classic example of this, but it's true for everything. For example, pretty much all the avocados available in the US are the Hass variety---because they have a nice, thick skin. But there are some really great tasting varieties that are mostly unavailable outside of Central America or the Caribbean simply because they don't transport well.
- stephencanon 15y ago

jberryman 15y ago

I'll use this article as an excuse to point people to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov who set up one of the first seed banks, and whose followers protected it through the siege of leningrad; some even starving to death surrounded by bags of rice. Seeds in a bank in Syria were recently moved out of the country to a nuclear bomb-proof vault in Norway protect them from damage. Preserving biodiversity is serious stuff.