The seeds from a plant grown from hybrid seed will grow just fine. They won’t have exactly the same properties, perhaps. The only reason you “can’t” plant them is that the government has granted a monopoly to a company that did the hybridization, and for some reason extended it to seeds from hybrid plants, even though they don’t breed true and are therefore not the patented strain.
(Any bets on how long someone will take to chime in that patents are “property”, not state-granted monopolies? I’m guessing someone shows up to object to my post within the next ten posts to the thread.)
I have planted a hybrid, greenhouse tomato, Campari, from saved seed. Not only did every seed germinate and grow well, every single plant is bearing loads tomatoes indistinguishable from purchased Camparis.
I am told that some other varieties of cherry tomato also grow true from saved seed.
I have also saved seed from an organic mini sweet red pepper bought in the supermarket. Same results: hardy plants that bear well and the fruit is exactly the same as the parent.
While this likely isn’t so with row crops, I wonder how many other varieties of garden vegetables will grow just fine and remain true from saved seed?
As for the government and monopolies, I know I am not the only hobby gardener doing this. There are photos on GardenWeb of Campari plants going back to 2005 or earlier. I also pass out starts every Spring and encourage the recipients to save seeds, start them and share, so there are eventually so many plants out there, neither the government nor the patent holder could ever know nor do anything about it.
For those plants that revert, I have long been curious as to how many generations it would take, w/cross pollination of the reverts, to get back to the original hybrid? I do know there is a group called The Tomato Project that is experimenting to produce more varieties of dwarf and miniature tomato plants. IIRC, I don’t think they are starting out with only open-pollinated varieties.
No they won't have the same properties. Sometimes the seeds are just plain infertile, but at best the fruit randomly scrambles back to a non-optimal generation. A Heritage seed will produce the same fruit, generation after generation, a Hybrid will never produce a fruit comparable to its original cross and will produce, if it produces at all a inferior product to a Heritage seed.
A Jackass is a Hybrid horse/donkey. It is stronger than a horse and larger than a donkey. It is also sterile. Plants run the same way. Most times they are not sterile, but a lot of time you might wish they were.
To top it off, a hybrid seed is optimized for commercial farming, they look great, you can pick them early and they hold up under shipping well. They produce far more fruit than a normal plant and some times, around 6 or 7 on the list of desirableness is the heading taste. Never is nutrition on the list because our science is not advanced enough to understand nutrition.
A hybrid for hundreds of years has been selected to be healthy, disease resistant, reliable, tasty and easy to raise for food. That is why Heritage seeds HANDS DOWN taste better and smell better than Hybrids. Cross breeding plants works good on a short term view, but in the long run, bites ya on the rear.
It is now suspected that the trace proteins of organic soil has a lot to do with nutrition, not just smell and taste. And why not? The components that make up smell and taste are highly complex proteins. Hard to synthesize from NPK fertilizer. It is suspected that is why chemically grown foods loose their taste after a few generations of soil usage with chemicals.
So for those who think of gardening as a way to survive the depression or the end of the world, you should NOT use Hybrid seeds.