Why Buying Heirloom Seeds Cost So Much

In this blog we will explain several reasons why heirloom seeds cost so much to buy but are well worth the money. Heirloom seeds are worth the money because you will not get these delicious flavors from hybrids or store bought tomatoes. Once you try an Heirloom tomatoes and vegetables, you will wonder why you have not tried them sooner and what you have been missing all your life. Yes it is that drastic of a change in flavors some sweet or acidic, smokey, tart, and you might find a few that have a few of those flavors in one tomato like Zebra Ezel.

Nutrients

Yes, we all have to use nutrients to feed our plants, but we added this here for the farmers that grow using OMRI products. When growing all organically even with nutrients and manures it can add more expenses. Let it be having items or manures shipped in or the cost of machinery and fuels to spread it if growing on a larger scale. Here are links to what OMRI products we use for our Soil and also my  Compost Teas.

Diseases

Most Heirloom plants are more susceptible to disease. Yes there are a few Heirlooms out there that are disease resistant, but the majority are not. Next we have to combat these diseases during the growing season which takes our time to do so along with money for products to use to help against the diseases. But it cost more for the organic grower to buy OMRI products to combat these diseases along with pest. Click Here I have a list of products we use to limit pest and diseases on my Heirloom plants.

Yields

Also yields that come from heirloom tomatoes and vegetables. Yes, some Heirloom tomato plants will produce these large tomatoes but maybe not a lot of them. So for a person selling the produce and seeds, they have to plant more of those varieties to be able to offer them for sale. By doing this it cuts down on space in the garden unlike planting hybrids. Also, some heirloom tomatoes do not produce a lot of seeds in the tomatoes and  if we want to offer them to the customers we have to plant more of that variety as well. A good example of this is the Australian Beauty Tomato, They are a large Heirloom tomato that has very few seeds in them. I had to plant 6 of these plants to offer seeds this year and planting 6 plants 4 feet(ca. 122 cm) apart took up 24 feet (ca. 7 meters) in my garden. Even though we planted that many plants we still did not get a lot of seeds compared to if we planted 6 plants of Lavender Lake Tomato.

Help and Shipping

Lastly, what drives up the cost in seeds in general is if you have to pay for help and wages going up. Also, the cost of shipping going up along with envelopes, labels, and bag prices. Yes, some sites offer free shipping, but sometimes the product they are selling are more expensive to offer free shipping. So before you know it, you might have been cheaper to pay for the shipping, and it would have been cheaper in the long run, or you could have gotten more for your money.

We hope this blog may help to see why buying seeds are expensive. Personally, when I first started buying seeds, I wondered why they were so expensive. Then after starting up this website and everything that went along with it. We quickly found out why they cost so much.