In an effort to save a little money, a lot of gardeners save their own seeds.  Sometimes this works, sometimes not.  The trick is to know the difference between “open pollinated” varieties and “hybrids.” 

There’s a popular misconception about hybrids.  A lot of folks think there’s something “unnatural” about them and steer clear, opting instead for more old-fashioned varieties. That’s too bad, because naturally hybridized plants help gardeners grow bigger, better fruits and flowers with less fertilizers and pesticides.  They are the organic gardener’s best friends. 

A really accurate scientific explanation of hybrids involves words like polyploidy, aneuploidy, autopolyploidy, and such, and tends to make my eyes glaze over. So, this is a basic, unscientific, home-gardener explanation of what a hybrid is and how it comes about.

In plants, hybrids are simply created by the selective mating of two  distinct varieties of the same plant.  A variety is a plant with a specific characteristic. For example, one variety of petunia might be white. Another petunia variety might have great disease resistance.  A hybrid is a combination (mating) of the white petunia (parent 1) with the disease-resistant petunia (parent 2).  The result  is a white petunia with great disease resistance (the “child” petunia).

True hybrids are not genetically altered.  There’s no laboratory hocus-pocus going on here.  Mankind has been creating hybrid plants for centuries, and you can create one right in your own back yard.   Tomatoes are very easy to hybridize, so let’s use them as an example.

Let’s say you want to get a dark-red disease-resistant tomato. You choose two varieties of tomatoes: One that produces the dark red fruit you’re looking for, and another variety that is known to be very disease-resistant. Once each plant is in blossom, put the pollen from one tomato’s flowers on the flowers of the other, and vice versa.   Each plant will go ahead and produce its own specific variety of tomato: The dark-red will produce its normal dark-red fruit, and the disease-resistant, its normal disease-resistant fruit.  But the seeds of those fruits will carry the traits of both parents. The seeds, not the fruit, are the “children” of the dark-red to disease-resistant mating.  This is the key to understanding why saving seeds from hybrids doesn’t always work;  it’s the seeds that are hybrids, not the fruits (or flowers).

Next year, when you plant those “child” hybrid seeds, you’ll get plants that bear tomatoes that are both dark red and disease resistant.  Those seeds (and the plants they produce) are hybrids.

Now, let’s say you decide to save the seeds from your hybrid dark-red disease-resistant tomatoes.  You plant them next year and, to your surprise, you get some plants that are dark-red and disease-resistant, but you also get some that are just dark red, and some that are just disease-resistant.  What happened? 

The simple answer is: Life is a crap-shoot, a genetic roll of the dice.  Some of those seeds will have the genetic material from their parents (the hybrid dark-red-disease-resistant plants), but they’ll also have genes from their grandparents: the dark-red variety, and the disease-resistant variety.  The beauty of life is that anything is possible; by planting the seeds saved from your hybrids, you might get any combination of traits, in varying degrees.  But you’ll always get tomatoes.  You haven’t created anything unnatural; you’ve simply introduced two varieties of tomato that you thought might produce beautiful children and let nature take it from there. 

Now, what about “open pollinated” varieties?  These are varieties (usually heirloom or very old varieties) that will indeed “breed true” from seed.  With these old-time varieties—‘Radiator Charlie’ tomato, for instance—you can save the seeds year after year and get the same ‘Radiator Charlie’ tomatoes year after year.  But…and this is a big but….only if you don’t introduce Charlie to any other tomatoes in your garden.  If Charlie and ‘Aunt Ruby’s Green’ tomato meet and produce seeds,  those seeds will produce a combination (a hybrid) of Charlie and Ruby. 

'Aunt Ruby's German Green' open pollinated tomato

The only way to ensure Charlie stays Charlie is to plant only Charlie (or isolate Charlie from ever meeting Ruby!). 

So, what’s so great about hybrids?  Because we can choose which traits we really like in a plant, by hybridizing, we can produce plants with those important traits. In many plants, one of the biggest benefits of hybridization is improved disease resistance.  Two different varieties with resistance to two different diseases can be bred together to produce a child plant with resistance to BOTH diseases.  Or, a very disease resistant variety can be bred to a very tasty (but illness prone) variety to get a disease-resistant tasty variety.  Once again, we’re talking varieties, not species….you can’t mate a tomato to a banana (two different species) for example, in the same way that you can’t mate your dog to your cat (a kituppy? a pupten?).

Open-pollinated, antique, and heirloom varieties are extremely valuable.  It’s important that we keep these varieties going and growing in our gardens, because they carry the genetic material that can be used to produce new hybrids. As well, for farmers and gardeners around the world who don’t have access to or can’t afford commercially produced hybrid varieties, these open-pollinated varieties allow them to plant a crop every year, simply by saving their own seeds. 

The "child" of 'Charlie' and 'Ruby' tomatoes...a hybrid!

The downside of hybrids is simply cost.  If you buy and fall in love with ‘Roly Poly’ hybrid zucchini, you’re going to have to buy seeds from Burpee’s every year to get ‘Roly Poly’…you can’t save the seeds and expect them to “come true.”