Quote:
Originally Posted by bower
Sorry to play devil's advocate, but I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing (in itself) but, like most things, it can certainly be negative if there is misrepresentation involved. |
I don't think anyone here could find fault with a seed vendor selling seeds clearly described as an unstable hybrid. You know what you're purchasing upfront. If you grow something that looks and/or tastes terrible, you haven't wasted your money and, more importantly, your entire growing season. You wanted to spin the roulette wheel and experiment from the get-go, right?
No harm, no foul. Experiments can be fun. We all took chemistry class in high school.
What isn't fun is when someone else is "experimenting" with your money and your time, without your knowledge. Or worse, intentionally deceiving you into making a purchase, based on their false advertising and lies.
Case in point. Below are two screenshots. One is from a forum, announcing the discovery of the tomato variety "Jim Dandy". The other is from a website now selling the seeds for "Jim Dandy".
Notice the date in the forum post: April 5th 2012. Based solely on what's written in the post, an unknown tomato variety cross-pollinated with a known orange variety and the resulting F1 hybrid seedling showed up in 2011. Seeds were saved from the one plant of this hybrid and were grown out in 2012.
The seeds saved from 2012 would produce the next generation hybrid, F2. F2 is an unstable generation, with different genetic traits of the parents expressing themselves in an unpredictable fashion.
In simple terms. It would be very unreasonable to expect any conformity from one plant to the next and to harvest fruits that look or taste like those from the previous F1 plant. This is why most folks don't bother saving seeds from F1 hybrid varieties. (and why you don't look identical to your siblings
)
Reading the seed ad in the second screenshot, you'll notice the date of the F1 plants' appearance has been pushed back
two full years.
Why?
Because if the truth were widely known about the date of the F1 origin for "Jim Dandy", most of us here wouldn't waste our money buying unstable F2 seed. Even with pushing the date back two years, the math still doesn't add up.
The saddest part of this story is that some folks are still going to purchase these seeds and waste their entire growing season before they discover they've been duped into buying something entirely different than advertised. The innocuous-sounding "appears to be stable" statement doesn't exculpate this vendor, either.
This is not an isolated incident with Marianna's Heirloom Seeds this season. Many of their 2013 "heirloom" offerings are a hodge-podge of genetically unstable crap.
Caveat Emptor...
