No, those are misconceptions, except under extraordinary circumstances. 1) "unless it is an heirloom seed it would not be viable". More hybrids than not will be fertile if seeds are collected from them. The rare cases are those from species so distantly related, that their chromosome counts are not normal and thereby affect the reproductive process. You can buy seeds with those types of chromosome counts, and they often produce seedless offspring or are infertile, but it's a long process to even produce them, not likely to happen spontaneously in your garden. So, that's essentially a false assumption. 2) "And if it does grow a plant it will never bear fruit. She said that she was always told that any and all hybrid seeds are genetically altered to not set fruit. No genetic alterations are done on hybrid seed. She must be thinking of GMO seed and that's an whole different ballgame than you'll find on a retail seed rack. All of my hybrid tomatoes for instance are fertile, I'm sure and their seed will still produce a tomato as well as an heirloom. The only difference is that if bred against itself, the seedlings it produces will not consistantly be similar to the parents in all respects. Some may, others may not. It's long and complicated to explain and has to do with ratios and statistics. LOL. Trust me, the odds are good you'll have babies off the seed. They just may not be what you expect.

BigCarl, "Specifically the Mortgage Lifter that is the result of cross breeding four different varities. Why will the Mortgage Lifter, a Heirloom, produce the same fruit from seed, when an Early Girl, a Hybrid, will not?" Jan's explanation is accurate. Mortgage Lifter was repeatedly selected for several generations to stabilize it after the initial hybrids of hybrids. It may not be 100% stable today. But you could continue the selection process to develop your own strain of Mortgage Lifter. Early Girl is an F1 hybrid. That's not to say that you couldn't save seed from Early Girl and get some interesting F2 variations, some of which you might like. The interesting thing about growing F2s is that you can see new characteristics that were different from either F1 parent. If you found an F2 that you liked, or several, you could save seed from it (them) and the resulting F3s would still vary a lot, but each group would be somewhat centered around the characteristics of the F2s that you selected. In several generations of such repeated selection you could stabilize one or more of your own varieties from the F1 Early Girl. Then you could go to the next level and cross a couple of those varieties to produce a new F1 hybrid tomato. By continually improving your inbred strains you can also improve the F1 hybrids that you can produce from them. There are a lot of ways you could combine, segregate, and recombine tomato genes. -- Burton --

I think this is rather hard to answer. The taste difference between one OP pepper and a hybrid one may just be because they are different varieties. Personally I don't think I have a highly developed sense of taste. I enjoy all kinds of foods but often one type of bell pepper (or corn, tomato, etc.) tastes a lot like the next. That might be due to my allergies - smell and taste being so closely linked. Anyways, more to your point, I can say one of my favorite peppers is Jimmy Nardello's which is an OP/Heirloom. To me, it has a very distinctive taste, at least at the semi-mature (beginning to turn red) state it achieved in my garden last year. It is sweet, "green-peppery" and very slighly pungent. I just ordered a lot of seed from Totally Tomatoes and that is the only variety I ordered two packets of. Plus, if an OP variety will grow in Seattle its a winner. Many OP varieties just don't have the vigor, cold-tolerance, etc. to grow and produce well here.

Haha! Fusion, I love that. "...Sungold is a weed!" Especially that that sentence ended with an exclamation mark! ;) If they taste like I've been reading on this forum, I sure hope so! About the parents of Sungold, it's too bad we don't know the exact crosses so we could even cross them at home. Interesting thing is one of the posts on here they were talking about Sungold being crosses of crosses. Which, in that case, I'd doubt many would do it that way anyways. But I guess mostly, when whoever created it is getting all our money, why SHARE the secret recipe to it? LoL At Capoman, I've heard that too. Which makes sense, as with hybrids you could take the best traits of different plants and through trial and error, combine the two. :) Well, guess it sounds like both my guesses as to why the Sungolds were growing so awesome were right! And thanks for the input. I love reading this forum, and now that I've started my tomatoes a while ago and are gonna plant them soon, I'm sure I'll be a frequent poster as well! Maybe next year I'll actually have some advice for others instead of just asking for help and advice. ;) Haha Angela