Storebought produce-seed viability...

[olliejen]

Posted this in Science, Math, Philosophy, but they're mostly interested in stuff w/o any practical application...

"When I was a kid, we used to spit watermelon seeds off the porch and into the front garden and not so surprisingly watermelon plants would grow with tiny little watermelons.

I told this to my wife the other day and she said her coworker (who grows a lot of his own vegetables) told her that nowadays, if you planted the seeds you get out of store-bought fruits and vegetables, the plants that grow won't bear fruit b/c they've been genetically engineered that way. Is that true?"

Anyone know this or have experience here?

[MrWookie]

I couldn't tell you if the seeds in store-bought veggies are viable nowadays or not, but I'm not so sure I'd blame genetic engineering if they're not. It might also be irradiation or hybridizing/other breeding that takes place w/o needing to genetically engineer the plants.

[olliejen]

Heya Wook. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I put another tentacle out to a guy I used to work with, growing food is his passion/hobby and he had this to say:

Most vegetables that one would buy in a store have come from hybrid seed. Hybrid seeds are developed by seed companies to create fruits (many "vegetables" are botanically considered fruits: squash, tomatoes, beans, peppers, etc.) and vegetables which meet the characteristics the industry is looking for. In American stores, this usually involves things like uniformity, fast growth, storage potential, general appearance, resistance to pesticides/herbicides, etc.. When hybrid plants make seed, the resulting seeds de-evolve back towards their parent plants, and the quality of what one might get from the second generation is unclear.

Moreover, many of the fruits are picked less than mature in order to further enhance shelf life, and whatever seed one might find is probably not viable.

There is a similar situation with tree fruits (apples, cherries, etc.) in that serious gardeners would never look to generate new plants from seeds, but rather through grafting of known cultivars onto target rootstocks. The legend of Johnny Appleseed would not be realistic in today's agricultural model.

There is a great discussion of seed production, storage, and business in Steve Solomon's book Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades. For novice gardeners the 1989 edition is best, as the newest edition is very technical and expects that you have a lot of gardening experience.

[jfk]

They're viable.

I used to have a corner of the yard which served as something of a passive compost heap. It constantly produced volunteers, often of the squash and melon variety. Tomatoes are very hardy will propagate from seed very easily. I remember on my last trip to Disneyland seeing a volunteer tomato popping through the well manicured boxwood.

You can't hem in nature.