Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties:
The Gardeners & Farmers Guide to
Plant Breeding & Seed Saving by
Carol Deppe
Suprise!!! This Book Is Fun!!!
All gardeners and farmers should be plant breeders, says author Carol
Deppe. Developing new vegetable varieties doesnt require a specialized
education, a lot of land, or even a lot of time. It can be done on any scale.
Its enjoyable. Its deeply rewarding. You can get useful new varieties much
faster than you might suppose. And you can eat your
mistakes.Authoritative and easy-to-understand, Breed Your Own
Vegetable Varieties: The Gardeners and Farmers Guide to Plant Breeding
and Seed Saving is the only guide to plant breeding and seed saving for
the serious home gardener and the small-scale farmer or commercial
grower. Discover:how to breed for a wide range of different traits (flavor,
size, shape, or color; cold or heat tolerance; pest and disease resistance;

and regional adaptation)how to save seed and maintain varietieshow to
conduct your own variety trials and other farm- or garden-based
researchhow to breed for performance under organic or sustainable
growing methodsIn this one-size-fits-all world of multinational seed
companies, plant patents, and biotech monopolies, more and more
gardeners and farmers are recognizing that they need to take back their
seeds. They need to save more of their own seed, grow and maintain the
best traditional and regional varieties, and develop more of their own
unique new varieties. Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The
Gardeners and Farmers Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving shows
the way, and offers an exciting introduction to a whole new gardening
adventure.
Personal Review: Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The
Gardeners & Farmers Guide to Plant Breeding & Seed Saving by
Carol Deppe
This is an outstanding book ... one of my favorites. It is targeted at an
advanced gardener or a student. If you are looking for an overview on how
to save seeds other books (Seed to Seed) are better. This book focuses
on the theory of breeding plants (how to create the traits you want) more
than the techniques (conditions for storing seeds or performing a cross-
pollination of a specific plant). But if you want to learn how to create new
and better life forms (plants) this is the book for you. Buy it.
I live in Arizona ... some native tribes call wild gourds "coyote squash" and
wild beans "coyote beans" implying the wily coyote planted poor-tasting
varieties of their crops in the desert as a trick. The truth is their ancestors
selected the best of the wild plants and, through generations of selecting
the best of their crops for next year's planting created the food we eat
today. The same thing happened on other continents. The Hopi knew to
separate blue cornfields from red cornfields if they wanted to keep the
crops pure. They did not know "why" that was true.
This book teaches you the "why" and how to become part of the tradition
that created better and better tasting foods from wild plants. And you gain
the advantage of the authors scientific knowledge of genetics and by
knowing the "why" can be much more effective in quickly creating the type
of plant you want (creating in a few years what would have taken your
forefathers generations).
For example, if the traits you want in a snow pea are the purple flower
(attractive garden) of one variety combined with the yellow pods of another
variety (easy to see and pick), the short plant size of a 3rd variety and the
resistance to local disease of a 4th variety this book will teach you how to
create such a plant. When your done you have a snow pea variety that
never existed before and is exactly what you wanted a snow pea to be.
Snow peas are just an example. You can do that with any cultivated crop
or even with a wild plant. The Indians used to eat Yucca blossoms; they

taste like a mild cabbage. Like most wild plants there is considerable
variety (some are bitter ... some not). Using the techniques in this book
you could domesticate this wild crop and create a new food source.
Creating new types of plants and new sources of food... if that seems
pretty close to playing God then this is the best book available for teaching
a novice how to play God.
I like the writing style. You can tell Carol Deppe loves her topic. She is a
professional but she is also a gardener. The style is simple even when
she tackles the type of complex topics generally reserved for college
textbooks.
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