I have saved two tomato types this year and a melon, neither are likely to have crossed with anything else. I've also saved french, broad and runner beans with sucess. I let A parsnip overwinter last year and go to seed, this year I had half a veg garden of self sown parsnips. They did better than the ones I planted.
this year I had half a veg garden of self sown parsnips. They did better than the ones I planted.
that's to be expected. If you take seed from a plant that has done well, as long as it 'comes true', each year you do it, it will adapt very slightly and you'll end up with one that is perfectly adapted to your micro-climate and soil ecology. Very strange weather one year may throw things out of kilter, but in most years, your home seed will do better.
The argument for us to try to save seed to use ourselves is that by doing so, we increase the bio-diversity, and therefore the bio-security, of that type of plant. Then if some disease that affects parsnips sweeps across Northern Europe sometime, it may be your strain of parsnip that survives when all the nursery raised ones that are genetically identical to one another are wiped out.
Gardening on the edge of Exmoor, in Devon
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
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The argument for us to try to save seed to use ourselves is that by doing so, we increase the bio-diversity, and therefore the bio-security, of that type of plant. Then if some disease that affects parsnips sweeps across Northern Europe sometime, it may be your strain of parsnip that survives when all the nursery raised ones that are genetically identical to one another are wiped out.
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”