Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 1890132721
Manufacturer: Chelsea Green
Average Customer Review: 
(From 6 total reviews)
List Price: $27.95
Amazon Price: $16.49 (6 new 2 used available)
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Editorial Reviews
Book Description:
All gardeners and farmers should be plant breeders, says author Carol Deppe. Developing new vegetable varieties doesn’t require a specialized education, a lot of land, or even a lot of time. It can be done on any scale. It’s enjoyable. It’s 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 Gardener’s and Farmer’s 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:
In 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 Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving shows the way, and offers an exciting introduction to a whole new gardening adventure.
Customer Reviews
Suprise!!! This book is fun!!! by Shelly Sutherland
I bought the earlier edition of this book for someone else…had no intention of reading it (or keeping it) but started to browse and got hooked!
This book reads like a novel–all the characters are my near and dear friends, the garden fruits and veggies. Mouth-watering detail sets the stage for getting your imagination started. What would you like to grow that you haven’t seen in the seed catalogues? A watermellon that can ripen in your northern climate? Greens that won’t be mowed down by slugs in your wet, costal garden? Perhaps a juicy, sweet tomato just like your favorite slicer, but in a convenient cherry size?
Just when you have all these images of the yummy possibilities dancing through your head, the story turns dark…Unfortunately, the professional plant breeders are not looking for the same things you are. Professional plant breeders want thick-skinned tomatoes that can be machine harvested, that ripen all at once, and that store and ship easily. (at this point, I want to yell, NOOO!!! Not THAT tomato!!!)
But sadly, past market forces have inadvertantly destroyed so much of the lovely work of our ancestors to produce flavor, long harvest periods, plants that survive organically, open pollination, and most of all, variety.
But wait! All is not lost! Remember how all those wonderful things came to be in the first place? Amateur plant breeders! And guess what? It doesn’t have to take a lot of time, or even much space, to start tweaking and experimenting with what you can get to grow in your own garden. You don’t even need experience, let alone a degree. And she’s got lots of stories and examples to prove it.
Then she starts throwing out possibilities I never would have thought of…why stick to things we already grow as vegetables? Why not domesticate one of the thousands of edible plants that no one else is even working on? Or how about experimenting with ways to use food that weren’t available when it all started, like developing something that microwaves conveniently?
I think Carol Deppe is a creative genius with the rare ability to communicate her passion and knowlege for her favorite subject. After reading this book, really after reading just the first few chapters, I felt like this is something that I really could do, and can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. People have been saving seed for thousands of years, it’s not rocket science.
For an idea of Deppe’s writing style, she’s written an interesting article about parching corn that you can find if you google “carol deppe and parching corn.”
Best Introduction to Breeding for Beginners by Robert A. Williams
The author has a PhD from Harvard in biology and is a geneticist. Yet she has written her easy-to-understand book as if she has a teaching degree from Ashland University. Her premise is that all our major food crops were originally developed by amateurs. Until recently, all gardeners and farmers saved their own seed and hence, all gardeners and farmers were automatically amateur plant breeders - and amateur plant breeding was the only kind of plant breeding there was.
Deppe’s book has two major purposes: 1) to encourage all of us gardeners and farmers to rediscover the excitement and rewards of developing your very own vegetable variety, and 2) to show amateurs how to breed plants more easily. As Deppe says “Any gardener can do them”. This book is for all gardeners everywhere. It’s for the gardener who has been told that “you can’t grow that here”, but who wants to anyway (such as artichokes in Ohio). This book is for growers who like white and purple carrots, and other crosses. This book is for seed savers, which is the first step in plant breeding. This book is for organic gardeners who want to develop powdery mildew-resistant varieties, by breeding them yourself.
Deppe’s chapters cover amateur vegetable breeding, space and time; roles and goals such as breeding for flavor, size, shape, earliness, cold or heat resistance, disease resistance, or yield; finding germplasm where she explains about the USDA-ARS National Plant Germplasm System; evaluating germplasm and conducting and evaluating garden trials; genetics and plant parenthood; sex and the single gene; modern genes; hybrids; plant-breeding stories; breeding with established polyploids; fun with wide crosses; happy accidental crosses; domesticating wild plants; and expanding horizons along with many appendices that list plants, vegetables, germplasm collections, seed saver organizations, supplies, and how-to information sources.
This is the best introduction to seed saving and breeding your own vegetable varieties you’ll find and invaluable to those interested in creating a unique vegetable variety.
Inspiring for anyone by Lisa
I’m a gardener but not a seed saver; I’d like to, but it’s a
somewhat confusing and overwelming subject. This book really
explained the issues of cross breeding and pollination, so I
could see why those seed saving instructions are so inconsistent.
And it is very inspiring about why I’d want to save seeds and
improved the variety, and why local seeds are so valuable,
and a number of great ideas on the mechanics both that I can use
(spacing isn’t so important when you’re testing for flavor) and
not so useful to me (I’ll probably not get forceps and remove
the stamens from unopened tomato flowers)
She is a plant genetists applying techiques to her own garden
for her own food, and I really liked how she describes her
though processes as well as what she does and how she does it.
Fantastic book by Andrea P. Mckinney
The author does a great job of explaining both the scientific and the practical aspects of breeding your own vegetable varieties. After reading this I felt I had the knowledge I needed to get started. Both motivating and inspiring.
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Tags: gardening, horticulture, plant breeding, vegetable gardening
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