Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carol Deppe

After reading Carol Deppe’s book about growing food staple crops in uncertain times I was excited to join the long list in a queue of library patrons awaiting their chance to read Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carol Deppe. The premise of this book is that most professional vegetable breeders have moved from the field to genetics and now it is up to us, amateur vegetable gardeners to develop open-pollinated vegetable varieties to suit our regional and personal needs. Perhaps a more accurate title for this book would have been The Amateur’s Vegetable Breeding Manual.
  

Carol Deppe's Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties - A must read!

What really impressed me when reading this book was the information Deppe gives about variety selection, variety crossing and the way in which she reveals how the greed of big seed corporations has kept farmers and gardeners dependent upon corporations.

In the process of reading I discovered that selection can be a little more tricky than I thought. Before I began reading this book I said to myself, “I’m smart enough to improve some current vegetable varieties I am growing through selection”. After reading Carol’s list of 27 things to consider when selecting breeding material in the section on variety selection I felt pretty overwhelmed. Even selecting for a trait as simple as disease resistance can be quite a task. To help you save time, Carol also tells about how you can determine when you cannot actually select for a trait. Carol additionally explains how to increase variability in a population of plants by growing enough of one type to select for specific traits. The reader quickly begins to understand that a keen eye and sound understanding is needed to observe new the occurrence of new genetic traits, either through selection or through crossing.

Crossing a variety of a specific vegetable is something Deppe devotes multiple chapters to. She skillfully guides amateur gardeners through the genetics of the first generation after a cross, or the F1, and explains what your chances will be of getting multiple traits you are seeking for from each parent plant. This helps gardeners determine how many plants they would need to grow to have a chance of obtaining a plant with the traits they desire. This goes along well with another chapter Deppe wrote on de-hybridizing hybrids – something that I would love to do with a few varieties myself. One other aspect I found very important in her writing was a breeding method called recurrent backcrossing, which enables the breeder to obtain just one trait of variety B while keeping most all of the traits of variety A. This was something big seed companies probably did before they began developing hybrid and genetically-modified seed.

In no way does Deppe demonize large hybrid or genetically-modified seed companies, though she gives them little excuse for their abusive practices which include supplying seed of hybrid plants without parents of known origin and creating seeds that will grow plants whose seed are completely sterile. Both of these practices only lead consumers to the conclusion that corporations have their own interests in profits far above the interest of those gardeners and farmers whose livelihood would be destroyed if the corporation went out of business.

Considering everything in this book, every gardener who is serious about gardening – even just to preserve the vegetable varieties they already have – should take some time to read this book. This is a no-nonsense guide with stories of breeding adventures and practical applications that you can implement the very next time you plant a seed.

Overwintering Carrots

While my wife was in Colorado this last week visiting her family her parents and she dug up some carrots her dad had overwintered. If you grow carrots and happen to overwinter them during a mild winter, next to the foundation on the south side of the house they will apparently keep growing over the winter. This is a little bit foreign to me because I don’t overwinter carrots – the climate in Tucson means that we sow, grow, and harvest carrots throughout the winter season. They live in Grand Junction, which does happen to have a little less snow than up in the mountains of Colorado. I’ll have to let you know how they taste. My wife jokingly said they’ll probably taste like winter.



Overwintered Scarlett Nantes from Grand Junction, CO



Update: I am happy to report that these carrots turned out to be very sweet. We baked them for dinner one night last week. You know kids like vegetables when they happily eat them up.

The Medium Dark Armenian

The medium dark green Armenian cucumber is the melon’s version of a regular American-type cucumber. This cucumber is a C. melo and can be easily crossed with muskmelons. It is completely average in size and shape. However, it has a very nice texture, closer to the texture of a Painted Serpent cucumber than to the texture of a regular white Armenian cucumber.

 

The Medium Dark Green in its natural habitat

 

The downy fuzz factor is minimal. The short hair that covers this melon is almost undetectable when sliced, but can be seen upon close inspection of the whole fruit. The disease resistance of this variety is good, but not as fantastic as the Painted Serpent. This means you would not want to plant this variety in an area that recently had Powdery Mildew. Fruit set begins at 65 days, a little after the regular Armenian but much sooner than the female fruits will set on the Painted Serpent. Additionally, the color and growth pattern of the fruit of the Medium Dark Armenian enable the gardener to easily spot it before it begins to set seed.

A closeup reveals the fuzz factor

 

If you are a gardener who is familiar with the regular Armenian Cucumber and do not want to grow them due to the taste, or if you are a gardener and you are concerned that your growing season may not be long enough for the Painted Serpent may I suggest you try the delicious Medium Dark Green Armenian cucumber.

Update: I currently sell seeds of this cucumber variety in sample seed packets at Cucumbershop.com.

 

This medium dark cucumber is well worth growing and eating

The Yamato Cucumber

Yamato Cucumber vine with fruit below

The challenges associated with hot humid climates often result in having to grow plants that require cooking to prepare such as eggplant, Chinese Long Beans, and Okra to name a few. Often heat and humidity does a number on tomatoes and cucumbers. The standard dark green thick-skinned American cucumber did not fare well in my garden – in the least. When asked about cucumbers, a fellow member of TOG (Tucson Organic Gardeners) told me that she just cheats and buys hybrid seed because she loves the flavor so much. For me the answer is not in buying hybrid seed, but in finding the right variety for my area. I had previously cultivated Suyo Long, which I enjoyed very much because of its heat resistance, big leaves, and delicious fruit. However, Suyo occasionally gave way to forms of root rot half way through the season and if grown near cucumbers or melons that became diseased it would, over a course of two weeks, succumb to disease as well. In the future I would like to grow a crop of Suyo Long plants in isolation to see if it can resist diseases better as a monoculture - though I rarely grow monocultures for fear that if disease spreads to similar plants I’ll lose the whole crop.



A vigorous Yamato vine.

The answer I found to growing a disease-resistant cucumber was Yamato, a variety touted to be just as delicious as Suyo but with better disease resistance. Perhaps I thought that since Suyo was a Japanese cucumber that other cucumbers of Japanese origin would work well in Tucson. My seed stock was acquired from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (SESE)*. In growing Yamato I found that it was very disease resistant and that it was able to sprawl out like a nice big cucumber vine should. My Yamato vines withstood a nearby cantaloupe giving way to mosaic and fought off an attack of powdery mildew from an Armenian cucumber rather well. Saving seeds from this variety was relatively easy as well, though I saved seeds from “selfing” the plant. That is – I used male flowers to pollinate the female flowers on the same plant. The next year’s seed did not germinate as well or produce plants as vigorous as the previous year’s. This leads me to believe that Yamato is pretty sensitive to inbreeding. Though the fruit of the second year’s plant did not have a negative side affect that the more vigorous vines did have.

Sliced Yamato Cucumber

The main drawback to the Yamato cucumber is something I feel probably deters the cucumber beetles from eating it all- the sap. The Yamato cucumber produces a bitter fruit in roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of the part of the cucumber connected to the vine. Some say you can use a trick to “bleed out” the bitter sap, but this has just not worked reliably for me. So I do one of two things. Either I pickle the fruit thinly slice the bitter portion and soak the slices in salt water. Given that the fruit get quite large, giving away a portion of the fruit for the rest is not too bad. The immediately edible portion of the fruit tastes like a thin skinned American cucumber - which is better than most grocery bought cucumbers but not quite as good as the Suyo Long. Another option in eating Yamato cucumbers would be to grow a lot of plants – saving the top for pickling and the bottoms two-thirds for immediate consumption. My second year’s cucumbers had no bitterness at all, but the incredibly poor vigor was a high price to pay for a couple tasty cucumbers. Besides, pickling cucumbers is fun to do. My Yamato pickles turned out pretty well for my first try. One of my children shares my enthusiasm for pickles as evidenced by the fact that he wanted a Jar of Yamato pickles for his birthday. This same child pleads for dill pickles every time we pass them in the grocery store.



My son, the pickle lover, with a Yamato Cucumber.



In summary, the Yamato is a disease resistant and heat resistant cucumber that requires a number of plants for seed saving and requires some additional effort if you wish to utilize the whole fruit. If you live in an area where these factors are of particular concern, you may just want to try growing a Yamato.

*Note: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange does not offer Yamato in 2012, but does hope to be able to offer it next year.

A Steep Price for Success

In the fall of 2009 I planted a few tomato plants that I felt would do relatively well over the winter. I kept them covered and they grew very well behind the plastic greenhouse I made. Unfortunately, the temperatures in the greenhouse during the daytime can get hot, and with all that vegetation and heat and humidity came disease.  



Tomatoes started in February and went through April

I am still dealing with the affects of the bountiful crop I had that next February and March even though the fruit is long gone. I have utilized proper crop rotation, soil inoculants, growing legumes, soil solarization and many other techniques to eradicate this blight (Septoria) from my garden. Alas disease - in one form or another - persists. Initially I felt this to be a tragedy. However, as time has passed my diseased bed is turning out to be a real asset. Having an enclosed diseased space helps me determine which of my Siletz tomato plants are disease resistant enough to start out in a greenhouse. Even though disease has persuaded me to refrain from growing the full lifecycle of any tomato plant in my greenhouse, I have not given up using my greenhouse for growing transplants.

Another crop of tomatoes from the greenhouse



Heat, cold, dense foliage and moisture all contributed to disease.