What's up everyone? Welcome back to Epic Gardening the podcast. My name's Kevin.

I'm the founder of Epic Gardening.com and today we're taking a question from my friend

Diana and what she asks is what is an heirloom plant. I hear

heirloom I hear gmo I hear hybrid I don't really know the difference between

these things and I want to know I want to know what the difference is so can you

shine some light on that of course I can so first of all let's tackle what a

hybrid plant is so a hybrid vegetable is created when breeders intentionally cross-pollinate two different varieties of a plant.

And the goal here is to produce an offspring, which we would call a hybrid, that contains the best traits of each of the parents. This is a natural process

and it occurs within members of the same plant species. Let's imagine two beans for example.

In hybridization, pollination is carefully, carefully controlled to ensure that the right plants are crossed to achieve the desired combination of characteristics.

Let's imagine a bean plant that you want to have more pods

or better disease resistance.

So the process of developing a hybrid typically takes a long time because you do not get these increased

traits in a single generation in almost every case.

Now, what is a GMO plant?

Pretty self-explanatory, genetically modified organism. This is where we change the plant's

DNA in a way that cannot occur naturally and sometimes includes the insertion of genes from other species.

So you can basically shortcut the hybridization process extremely quickly.

Now finally, we get to heirloom plants.

So this is a broader definition that is a bit dependent on who you ask, but typically

heirloom plants are older varieties, typically from before

World War II. Most heirlooms come from seed that has been handed down for generations in a particular region or area of the world,

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