6 Tasty Hybrid Fruit And Vegetable Varieties To Try

Hybrid fruits and vegetables are the result of crossbreeding between two different cultivars. The goal of hybrid vegetable or fruit hybrids is to create a new cultivar or hybrid with the best traits of the parent plants. This means that hybridized vegetables and plants often have many benefits over open-pollinated crops. The list of hybridized crops is lengthy, so we’ve compiled our own list of the top six hybrid plants to try in your garden.

Cross-pollinations occurs in nature, but hybridization is when a grower intentionally cross-breeds two different cultivars of the same species. This intentional breeding has been around since at least the mid-19th century when the Austrian Monk Gregor Mendel demonstrated the procedure.

Often confused, it is worth noting that hybrid plants are not genetically modified plants.

Hybrid plants are created because someone noted that a particular variety of cucumber, for instance, has a marked resistance to disease over another type of cuke. The breeder wanted all of her cucumbers to have the advantage of disease, resistance so she crossbred the disease resistant variety to another type of cucumber.

So now the breeder can grow cucumbers that are much less susceptible to diseases than previous cultivars. Not only that, but the new hybrids are likely easier and faster growing, adapt better to stresses, and produce plants with larger fruit and higher yields.

Because hybrid seeds are made up of DNA from two separate cultivars, they can not be saved and used the successive year. If you do save the seed and plant it, there is no guarantee what plant you’ll get. It may have the qualities of the first or second parent plant, or be an amalgamation of both, but it will not be true to the previous