Growing delicious vegetables from seeds is one of the most rewarding of all gardening activities. We gardeners get started doing it with great anticipation and relish. Selecting seed varieties can be a little daunting because there are lots of choices. To further complicate things, both the gardening press and the marketing arm of many of the seed catalogs sing the virtues of older open pollinated, heirloom varieties or sleek new hybrids, implying that one kind is better than the other or even more politically correct. What's a gardener to do! Looking more closely at how open pollinated, heirloom and hybrid seeds are developed and come to market may bring some degree of clarity to the subject.

A few basic definitions are in order to begin any discussion. The term F-1 hybrid means the first filial generation made by crossing two different parent varieties, the offspring of which produce a new, uniform seed variety with specific characteristics from both parents. For example, breeders may choose to cross two tomato varieties to make an F-1 hybrid that exhibits the early maturity of one parent with a specific disease resistance of the other. The unique characteristics of an F-1 hybrid are very uniform only in the first generation of seed, so seed saved from F-1 plants will not come true if replanted and may exhibit many distinct types in the second generation, often reverting to various ancestral forms. To produce consistent F-1 hybrids, the original cross must be repeated each season. As in the original cross, this is done through careful and controlled hand pollination and seed production is often offshore, where labor is cheaper. Many common home garden tomatoes, such as Early Girl, Celebrity, or Carmello are F-1 hybrids, and most commercial fruiting vegetables seen in supermarkets like eggplants, tomatoes, melons and bell peppers are grown from F-1 hybrid varieties.