Heirloom Seeds

Heirloom seeds carry generations of flavor, history, and careful selection into today’s garden. This collection brings together non-GMO vegetables, herbs, flowers, grains, and other time-tested, open-pollinated varieties valued for their distinctive character and seed-saving potential.

Grow familiar favorites, rediscover uncommon varieties, and save seed from the plants that perform best in your garden. Explore the full collection, including certified organic options, and carry a much longer growing tradition into the next season.

Growing and Saving Heirloom Seeds

Heirloom seeds carry generations of careful selection into each new garden. Gardeners kept the varieties that offered memorable flavor, unusual color, dependable harvests, regional character, or a story worth preserving. Growing them gives those choices another season to take root and another place to call home.

Each heirloom brings its own character to the garden. Some are tied to a family, farm, region, or community, while others have endured because their flavor, beauty, or usefulness continued to earn a place year after year. Planting a mix of vegetables, herbs, flowers, grains, and fruits creates a garden rich with variety and connected to a much longer growing tradition.

Stewardship begins simply: grow these varieties well, learn their habits, share their harvests, and pass their stories along. Whether a seed is saved, exchanged, or planted again next season, each crop becomes part of a living chain between the gardeners who came before and those who will follow.

Carry the Garden Forward

Heirloom Garden Questions

What makes a seed an heirloom?

Heirloom seeds are open-pollinated varieties preserved over time for their history, flavor, appearance, adaptability, cultural importance, or connection to a particular place or community. While definitions vary, a variety is often considered an heirloom once it has been grown for 50 years or more, with many passed from one generation of gardeners to the next.

Can seed be saved from heirloom plants?

Yes. Heirloom varieties are open-pollinated, so seed can generally be saved and grown again. Some crops cross readily with nearby varieties, making distance, timing, caging, or hand-pollination useful when keeping a variety true.

Are all heirloom seeds organic?

Heirloom refers to a variety’s history and how it has been preserved over time, while organic refers to how the seed crop was grown and certified.

Many of the heirloom seeds we source are Certified Organic. Seeds grown here at Bucktown Seed Company are produced using Certified Naturally Grown practices. Other heirloom varieties may come from growers who use regenerative, soil-building, and low-input methods without pursuing formal organic certification, so the growing and certification details are listed on each product page.

Which heirloom crops are easiest for beginning seed savers?

Beans, peas, lettuce, tomatoes, and many self-pollinating flowers are welcoming places to begin. They are generally easier to keep true than crops such as corn, squash, cucumbers, or brassicas, which can cross more readily with nearby varieties.

Grow a Piece of American History

Rooted in America

Six American heirlooms chosen for their flavor, history, and enduring place in gardens across the country.

Explore the Seed Kit

Heirloom Seeds

Growing and Saving Heirloom Seeds

Carry the Garden Forward

Organic Garden Seeds

Beginner Garden Seeds

Medicinal Garden Seeds

Heirloom Garden Questions

Grow a Piece of American History

Rooted in America