Gardening: Hybrids may be best bet for short growing season

As questions about starting seeds are starting to come in remember it’s a little too early to start most of them indoors.

Cool season vegetables like cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and kale can be started around March 1 to be ready to plant in the garden around the middle of April.

Warm season crops like peppers, tomatoes and eggplant need to be planted about March 15 for a transplant date around the last two weeks of May depending on the weather. Melons, squash and cucumbers need to be planted in late April for setting out around Memorial Day.

If the starts are planted too early and become root bound before planting, they become stunted and can’t recover quickly enough for our short season.

There is a lot of interest these days in heirloom varieties of vegetables and flowers, or those that have been around for more than 50 years. Some people think the old heirloom varieties have more flavor than modern hybrids and some of them do. Others are seeking them out because their seeds can be saved and planted the next year, a process called open pollination. The genetic code of the parent plants passes their traits to seeds through the natural exchange of pollen between plants.

Unfortunately, most popular heirlooms were developed in places with much warmer and longer growing seasons. Getting a Brandywine tomato that was developed in the Brandywine Valley of Pennsylvania that needs an 80- to 90-day growing season is a challenge. Our springs and early summers are cool and our first frosts come around early September which may not give it enough time to ripen.

Most of the vegetables we can grow here come from hybridized seeds. These are produced through the selective crossing of two or more varieties to produce specific traits in the subsequent offspring, a process that can’t take place in nature. The seeds of hybridized varieties won’t remain the same in the next generation and can’t be saved.

Hybridization has been going on for centuries. Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, documented the process in the mid-1800s when he hand-pollinated sweet pea plants to produce offspring with specific flower colors. His work laid the ground work for the commercial development of new varieties to this day.

This process can take a decade or more to produce results. Plants have to be selected for desired traits and then crossed to create seeds. The seeds are then grown out and those with the best expression of the traits are crossed and planted again. Once plants with the right traits are developed, they are grown out for several generations to ensure the traits are stable and won’t revert back or lose the traits.

Thus a plant can be bred to mature in a shorter season. Have fun experimenting.