Heirloom and Heritage Vegetable Seeds
An heirloom variety is one that has been grown and passed on long enough to be worth keeping. There is no legal definition and anyone can print the word on a packet, so the useful test is a practical one: is it open pollinated, and does it have a place and a history attached to it?
Everything in this section passes both.
Open pollinated means you can save the seed
This is the real difference between an heirloom and an F1 hybrid, and it is worth understanding properly.
An F1 hybrid is the first generation cross of two parent lines. It is uniform and often vigorous, but its seed does not breed true. Save it and next year's plants are a scattered mess of the grandparents. You have to buy again every season, which is precisely the point of selling it.
An open pollinated variety breeds true. Save seed from your best plant, sow it next spring, and you get the same vegetable. Do that for a few years, always keeping seed from the plants that did best in your own ground, and you slowly end up with a strain adapted to your specific garden. That is how every heritage variety in this catalogue came to exist in the first place.
Why Italian heirlooms suit Ireland
Franchi Sementi has been a family business near Bergamo since 1783, and northern Italy has cold wet winters much like ours. The varieties they preserved for those conditions transfer well: cavolo nero, radicchio, escarole, cime di rapa, winter lettuce and chicory. These crop through an Irish winter in open ground.
The heat lovers are a different story. Large peppers, aubergines and beefsteak tomatoes want a tunnel here. We say so on the individual product pages.
Flavour is the point, not nostalgia
Heritage varieties were not selected to survive a lorry journey or to ripen all in one week. They were selected because someone liked eating them. That usually means thinner skins, shorter shelf life and considerably better flavour, which is exactly the trade a home grower should want and a supermarket cannot make.
It also means you can grow things that are not for sale anywhere in Ireland at any price.
Sowing notes
Heirlooms are generally no harder than modern varieties, but they are less uniform. Expect plants to ripen over several weeks rather than all at once, which for a household is an advantage rather than a fault. Germination is normally strong, though Franchi packets are filled by weight and are generous, so sow thinly or you will thin out most of what comes up.
If you want to save seed, grow only one variety of each self pollinating crop at a time, or keep varieties well apart. Tomatoes, peas, beans and lettuce are the easiest to start with. Timings for Irish conditions are in the when to sow guide.
Packets start at €3.50 and delivery is included on orders over €40. Seed registered with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, posted by An Post from Co. Longford.