Patrick from blog Bifurcated Carrots makes the case for using open pollinated seeds.

When you buy commercial garden seeds, there are two main types, Open Pollinated (OP) and F1 hybrids. OP seeds have one clear obvious advantage. If properly done, you can save your own seeds and re-grow OP plants in future years without having to buy more seeds. This is not the case with F1s, because they are not genetically stable.

Are there any advantages to growing F1s? The short answer is very rarely. Certainly a lot of marketing goes along with F1s. Claims of everything from disease resistance to increased yields, uniform sizes and colours.The overriding theme of this marketing usually is commercial F1 hybrid varieties are the only sure thing to grow, so why take a chance withanything else?

There are almost no small seed companies producing F1 hybrid seeds anymore. Nearly all commercial garden seeds sold in the world come fromone of the following six companies: Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Mitsui, Aventis and Dow. These are the same companies that sell seeds to most farmers.

Your garden is not very interesting to these six companies, and even though the seed catalogues make it seem otherwise, they don’t usually make seeds specially for home gardeners. Instead they sell you the same fruit and vegetable seeds they sell to farmers, they just market them in a different way.

Farmers choose their varieties according to things like thick skins foreasy transport, attractive and uniform appearance, high productivity in an intensive farming situation with heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers.They also like plants that don’t grow too big, for easy handling and plant varieties that produce their harvest all at once, rather than gradually over the course of a season. These are traits few gardeners are interested in.

Since these big six seed companies are in many cases the same ones that sell pesticides and fertilizers, and they make more money when farmers buy these, they generally breed their plant varieties to need these chemicals in order to grow properly.

It’s possible an F1 variety has something like special disease resistance,but since you aren’t a farmer and you are probably growing your seeds in a garden without chemicals, the chances are that whatever resistance it haswon’t be interesting to you. OP seeds have important disease resistance too, and probably more interesting for the home gardener. Almost all marketing claims can be explained in this way, and you will mostly find there are no real reasons for choosing commercial F1 seeds over OP varieties.

The most important thing is what grows well in your garden, and meets your needs. If an F1 variety does this for you, then this is what you should grow. In fact just buying an OP variety is no guarantee of success, and these big six companies make OP varieties too.

Choosing OP over F1 is a good place to start, and means your chances ofsuccess are as high or higher than with F1 varieties. The best seeds togrow however are those that come from nearby, like fellow gardeners orlocally produced. Otherwise look for seeds from seed companies that specialize in non commercial varieties, like those that state a public policy of never selling anything by OP varieties. Better still, get yourseeds from other seed saving gardeners.

For ideas of seed companies havea look at my list at the bottom of this page. For other gardenerssharing their seeds via the Internet, have a look at my seed network page.