Heirloom seeds are usually open-pollinated, meaning that wind or insects fertilize the seed. They’ll breed true to their parent plants, so if you harvest the seeds and replant them you will get the same variety.
Is it just me, or does this strike you as a huge over-simplification — not to say error? And there’s more — lots more — where that came from.
Yes, an error, open-pollinated seed means you are only certain of the genotype of one parent, unless that particular variety is being grown in a huge monoculture, and even then you aren’t completely certain. One fellow argued that his “open-pollinated” tomatoes always looked the same no matter where the pollen came from, and he didn’t understand that the seeds are offspring of two parents. And what is the fascination with “organic” seeds? Does anyone get this? My cynical side says this is a green ploy to bilk people who fall for the “organic” label. To suggest that “inorganic” seed somehow negatively affect your garden is pretty Lamarckian sounding.
I don’t think the organic seed argument is purely Lamarckian. At least I have read some not implausible arguments that when you grow from open-pollinated seed, the environmental pressures selecting the best offspring are not the same when the plant is grown “organically” Vs. “inorganically”. Assuming that you want to select the individuals best adapted to the local environment, “inorganic” methods, by minimizing the environmental pressures on the plants, change the fitness. Is that nonsense?
There is a pretty interesting literature emerging on breeding in organic systems FOR organic systems so that plants are selected for characteristics necessary in an organic or any other low input system, such as ability to deal with heterogeneous and slow release nutrient sources, weed competition, disease and insect resistance, etc… Kind of like many breeders in participatory breeding recognized that breeding in farmers’ conditions (on farm) often leads to better adapted varieties… See Julie C. Dawson, Kevin M. Murphy, Stephen S. Jones(2008) Decentralized selection and participatory approaches in plant breeding for low-input systems. Euphytica 160:143–154
And careful before bashing Lamark too much as epigenetics is suggesting maybe he wasn’t all wrong on certain levels:
http://network.nature.com/groups/molecular_genetics_and_rna_world/forum/topics/998
I’m with Jay and José on this. Selection for performance in an organic system stresses different traits, for example, low leaf angle for better weed suppression versus high leaf angle for better capture of light, in cereals. Many others. Most of which are irrelevant to gardeners. And whether the seed was grown organically, as opposed to selected under organic conditions, is probably irrelevant too.
PLUS, lest we forget, seed production under conventional conditions is often a chemically intensive affair with liberal use of pesticides to protect the high value crop, subject to different regulation than food crops.. Minimizing pesticide release into the environment should not be dismissed as a trivial desire… Yes, organic seeds bred and produced under organic conditions will very often be better adapted to such a system, but also by utilizing organically produced seeds one assumes they are supporting a less polluting seed industry and not supporting leaching of chemicals into someone else’s backyards..