“Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties” by Carol Deppe

An outstanding, inspiring book that shows us how much power we have as home gardeners and seed-savers to select and improve the plants we grow, be they vegetables, fruit trees, or any other plant. She shows how to do everything from very consciously directed breeding programs, to simply being aware of how your growing conditions will adapt your variety over time to your conditions.Example: Deppe was doing a pea-breeding project over several years. In her area of Oregon, slugs tend to eat the tender growing tips of newly sprouted pea plants. Some of the plants in her breeding population made lots of branching low to the ground, while others focused their energy into growing straight upwards for a while before branching. Slugs don’t climb very high, so the low-branching ones were eaten by slugs, while the high-branching types tended to have very little slug damage. So over several generations, only the high-branching, slug-resistant types were still left in the breeding population. Most plant breeders would have just put out slug bait, but because Deppe gardens organically, she automatically succeeded in breeding slug-resistant peas without even having to think about how to achieve that goal.