In the past I’ve grown hybrid vegetables, mostly the varieties that have been developed to produce early yields. Because of this, I was able to grow things like sweet corn in northern climates. However, from a practical point of view I am dead set against them if you intend to incorporate them into a “self-reliant” gardening plan.
While these hybrids can taste good, I’ve found that most have been developed for commercial traits such as ease of shipping, holding saleable color and flavor for long periods, and for ensuring the simultaneous ripening of entire fields of a vegetable to facilitate mechanical harvesting.
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The one big negative is that hybrid seeds do not produce true reproductions of the mother plants. This makes buying new seed every year a necessary, expensive, and for someone who wants to become self-reliant, a dangerous practice.
Monsanto has gone one step further in developing the “Terminator Gene” in field crops, which renders the seed produced in a farmer’s field sterile.

