North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["road's end farm" <organic101@linkny.com>]

Heirloom in vegetable varieties I believe means that the variety was at 
some point not on the commercial market (that is, seed was not available 
for sale); the variety survives because it was passed down in a family 
or within a local community. Some of these varieties are now available 
again through ordinary seed catalogues. The term also implies an older 
variety, though I don't know if there is any consensus on the age: fifty 
years maybe? Often the age of heirloom varieties is unknown.

Due to the difficulties of keeping a hybrid strain as a hybrid in this 
fashion, vegetable heirloom varieties are to the best of my knowledge 
all open pollinated. Some open pollinated varietes are of recent 
commercial breeding and are not heirlooms.

I would think that a fruit variety, even if grafted/cloned, would 
qualify as an heirloom if it had been maintained in a similar manner 
within a family or community, while not being offered by any company for 
general sale. I don't know if there's any consensus on this, though.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>
> To: "NAFEX" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 10, 2002 9:43 AM
> Subject: [NAFEX] Antique vs. Heirloom
>
> >    I see two terms used in NAFEX fairly often that I'd like to get
> > clarification, or at least some sort of consensus on, "antique" and
> > "heirloom" varieties.  To me "antique" refers to a variety that is 100 
> > or
> > more years old and is propagated by asexual means - grafting, budding,
> > taking cuttings, etc. so it is identical to the original variety.
> >     However, with "heirloom" I have always thought of that as a variety
> > propagated from seed.  It usually refers to vegetables, but can refer 
> > to
> > perennials where the seedlings have a very strong resemblance to the
> parent,
> > such as the Door County apricot, which is commonly grown from seed.  On
> the
> > other hand, it would be unlikely to find an heirloom apple, since very 
> > few
> > come true from seed.
> >    What do others say about this?
> > -Lon Rombough