Buying seeds for the kitchen garden

Seeds come in all shapes and sizes. You can buy more than a thousand types of seeds online on our website. This can sometimes be overwhelming. With this article we want to create some clarity in the extensive supply so you can easily get started.

What types of seeds are there?

🌱 Seedfast species

We can divide the seeds into two major groups: the hybrid seeds and the seedfast species. Characteristic of the seedfast variety is that the offspring has the same characteristics as the mother plant. This variety is created by the conventional method of crossing. Subsequently, continuous selection in the generations of offspring takes place over a number of years. This ensures that the variety will become stable and will develop the same characteristics as the parent plant.

🌱F1 hybrids

With the hybrid variety, you work with two parent plants that both have different but desirable characteristics. For example, a plant with a high yield and a plant with high disease tolerance. To create a hybrid variety, inbreeding is first necessary in the parent lines. The plants are therefore bred separately from each other for a number of years through self-pollination until they are homozygous. This means that all offspring of the parent plants will have the desired characteristics. When both parent plants are homozygous, they can be crossed again. The offspring from this process is called the F1-hybrids. They are the best of both worlds and possess the most important characteristics of the two parent plants. The plants that come out of this seed will look identical and have the same taste.

The advantages and disadvantages at a glance

In the past, it was quite common for gardeners and farmers to grow their own seeds and thus have a wide variety of seeds, each with a different characteristic. Nowadays, with the rise of the F1 hybrids, the seed variety is being used less and less. If you look purely at the yield, the hybrid seeds are TOP. Both varieties have their advantages and disadvantages. To keep it clear, we have added an overview below.

	Advantages	Disadvantages
Seedfast species	Cheap	Uneven shape. Sometimes different taste
	Easy to grow your own seeds	Often more susceptible to disease
Hybrid variety	Plants have the same growth rate, taste and shape	More expensive (due to the complicated process)
	Many combinations possible	Can't grow your own

Hybrid seed, it can be organic too!

What many people do not know is that hybrid seed is also used in organic farming. The condition for this, of course, is that organic hybrid seed is purchased. You can recognise these by their quality mark.

SKAL is the organisation in the Netherlands that checks whether the organic seeds comply with the official laws and standards. You can therefore recognise the organic seeds by their EKO quality mark or SKAL certificate. In this way, consumers are protected from being misled. Companies that want to qualify for this certificate are first visited by an inspector. The inspector checks whether the company meets the proposed requirements. If this is not the case, a whole series of measures will be imposed on them. So you can rest assured that the entire cultivation process is scrutinised.

But how does organic cultivation differ from the traditional variant? The plot on which the plants are placed must be organic. This means that the planting material must be organic and that only a limited amount and type of fertiliser can be used. The principle of crop rotation must also be applied to keep the soil fertile. In this way, parasites, weeds and diseases can be controlled in a natural way. The production of organic seeds has increased considerably in recent years, and we are pleased about that.

Choose from all our seeds here

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