Customer Reviews

Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's & Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding & Seed Saving

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I fell in love with the first edition of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, and I am even more delighted with this second edition (published in December, 2000). It is rare to find an author with Carol Deppe's depth of scientific knowledge who is able to distill what is most useful from that knowledge and combine it with a large dose of practical experience. Add to this the fact that Deppe is a captivating storyteller, and you have an informative book that is truly a delight to read.

While Deppe clearly has one foot in the world of genetics and the science of plant breeding, the other she has firmly planted among the peas and squash in her own garden. She relates tales of her garden ventures and introduces you to other adventuresome plant breeders. As you read on, you will find yourself daydreaming about a new variety, perhaps a tomato that would have "real" tomato flavor, be extra nutritious, grow happily in one of your homemade tomato cages, and thrive in your garden. But, as Deppe explains, the only way to get that variety is to breed it yourself. The professional plant breeders won't do it for you. Their attention is focused on a few commercially important food crops, their goal the development of those traits that are of benefit to commercial growers, such as suitability for mechanical harvesting and long distance transport. Deppe's focus is on breeding varieties that, among other things, thrive under organic and/or sustainable growing conditions.

Gardeners and small scale farmers can, and do, breed the varieties they want. Although successful plant breeding doesn't necessarily require a lot of time or garden space, it does require some knowledge---thus, the primary need for this book. The technical chapters are well-crafted guides to the principles of genetics combined with practical and workable strategies for applying those principles. Especially useful are the sections on designing garden trials and on how to be certain you are indeed selecting for the traits you want. There are also detailed illustrated instructions showing how to breed eight popular vegetables: tomato, lettuce, pea, bean, corn, onions and relatives, cabbages and relatives, and squash/pumpkins. An appendix contains essential data for breeding 801 cultivated vegetables and their wild relatives, useful information for all plant breeders.

Deppe also shares many practical techniques, methods, and strategies, gleaned from years in the garden. These tips are invaluable. They get you thinking about ways that you could experiment and explore more with the garden resources you have. And when things don't go quite as hoped, she reminds you that you can eat your mistakes.

At the heart of any plant breeding venture is good seed saving practice. Even gardeners who do not consider themselves to be plant breeders, when faced with the disappearance of their old favorites from the seed catalogs suddenly want to save their own seed. There are a number of factors you must handle properly if you are going to save your own seed and maintain vigorous, pure strains. The six new chapters added to this edition to cover this area take seed saving much farther than has been done elsewhere. There is a whole chapter devoted to selecting the individual plants from which you will want to save seed, while other chapters discuss isolation practices, the number of plants required, and other factors.

Even if all the vegetables on your table come from the grocery store, you might want this book for the new chapter that compares the advantages and limitations of classical plant breeding techniques with those of genetic engineering. Deppe provides a perceptive discussion of the results, both intended and unanticipated, of applying genetic engineering to the development of food crops. She also explains why classical plant breeding methods remain an important, and in many instances preferable, tool for enhancing our food supply.

All in all, an informative, insightful, and most enjoyable book that is an essential guide for gardeners and small scale farmers alike.

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."

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.

I was looking for a book on seed saving. This book sounded like it had information on that topic, plus the topic of breeding your own plant varieties; a 2 for 1!. I was a little disappointed that there weren't any pictures in the book. I would have liked to have seen some visual examples of hand breeding, different flower types, pictures of plant parents and their offspring, and of course a few concerning seed saving. But the vast amounts of information in this book more than make up for the lack of a few pictures. Overall a good book and a great resource for the home gardener.

I bought this book a few months ago and have been enjoying it very much. I am a hardcore gardener and for many years now I have been breeding my own roses and have also done some hybridizing with begonias. I had never tried crossing vegetables though.
After reading Carol Deepe's neat book though, I've decided that starting next spring I will be making some hybrid crosses with vegetables, for sure.
Most people who garden do not really understand the whole process of making crosses, of creating new hybrids. This book explains it very clearly and gardeners will find out that it isn't really difficult at all. Quite simple actually, and with some often remarkable rewards.
As explained well in this text, vegetables today are mostly bred just for the market, for things like better shipability. Breeding for taste and other such, is pretty well now left up to the amateur breeders. My point here is that if you want to grow the best vegeatbles, you almost need to start crossing your own.
One of the biggest pleasures of creating your own vegetable crosses is that they are YOUR OWN. You can then grow things that no one else is growing, planting seeds that are not for sale anywhere. This can add a huge amount of pleasure to gardening. It just makes it all much more fun.
This book is useful, interesting, well written and easy to understand. It would make a great present for anyone who loves to garden and by all means get one for yourself, too. It will easily pay for itself the very first season you own it. A dandy book!

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.

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.

Having recently purchased this book I found myself wondering what took me so long.
This book is so valuable it makes me mad at myself for not acting earlier.
The book takes you through the most elementary stages going so far as to explain and indeed illustrate the anatomy of a blossom, the differences between an open pollinated and non, the various reasons for wanting to not only save seed but to develop a strain to reflect your requirements and much more.
Replete with glossary, necessary for me,index and annotated bibliography.
I found this book fascinating and highly practical for anyone wanting to take their gardening to the next level.
From seed saving to seed hybridization. Fascinating!

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.

This is an extra-ordianary book. Very detailed but very readable. It encouraged me to experiement and provided answers for past results.