What Is Open Pollination? A Guide to Open Pollinated Plants

Open pollination describes plants that have been pollinated naturally, either by cross-pollination or self-pollination. Cross-pollination methods include pollination by wind, water, or pollinators like bees or other insects. In self-pollination, a plant has both female and male parts and can pollinate itself. Open-pollinated seeds, also called “true to type” or “true to seed,” are a result of the natural pollination of two plants of the same variety. When planted, open-pollinated seeds should have the same characteristics as the parent plant. This is in contrast to hybrid seeds, which are the result of manually pollinating two different varieties to achieve a new variety with characteristics from both.

When browsing an organic seed catalog, you’ll typically see labels like open-pollinated (or OP), heirloom, or hybrid (also indicated by the letter F followed by a number). Here’s what they all mean.

• Open-pollinated: Open-pollinated seeds are the result of natural cross-pollination or self-pollination between two plants of the same variety. If you plant open-pollinated varieties in your garden, they will produce seeds that you can save and plant the following year to grow the exact same plant.
• Heirloom: An heirloom seed is an open-pollinated variety that has been cultivated for at least forty years. Heirloom varieties have often been saved for so many years because of their exceptional flavor, color, or hardiness. When a restaurant or farmers’ market advertises heirloom tomatoes, they’re essentially letting you know that their tomatoes come from a prized plant tomato variety that has been open-pollinated for decades.
• Hybrid: Hybrid plants are essentially the opposite of open-pollinated plants. They result from pollinating two different varieties to create a hybrid with desired traits such as disease resistance, pest resistance, higher yields (due to hybrid vigor), or a longer shelf life. If you save the seeds from first-generation or F1 hybrids, your saved seeds may grow into plants that look like the parent plants or have an undesired combination of characteristics. This means that you cannot use hybrid varieties for seed-saving, a practice by which farmers and home gardeners collect the seeds of particularly healthy plants at the end of the growing season so that they can continue to grow these favorite plants without buying new seeds each year. If you purchase hybrid seeds, you will need to purchase the same seeds again each year to grow the same plants. This means that commercial growers who value hybrid characteristics are often dependent on plant breeders, since they cannot save their own seeds.

The biggest advantage of buying open-pollinated or heirloom seeds is that you can use seed-saving to select the plant varieties with the best genetics in your garden to reproduce the next year. If you’re planning to save seeds, find out whether your plants are cross-pollinated or self-pollinated. This information may be found on the seed packet or online.

• Cross-pollinating plants: Cross-pollinators require pollen to be transferred between plants by wind, water, or an insect, although gardeners can also manually apply pollen. Examples of cross-pollinating plants include beets, corn, cucumbers, apples, grasses, and pumpkins.
• Self-pollinating plants: Self-pollinating plants have all of the genetic organs built into their flowers, so they will pollinate themselves. While these plant varieties can self-pollinate, many of them can also be cross-pollinated. Self-pollinating plants include tomatoes, green beans, rice, apricots, peaches, lettuce, peas, and potatoes.

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