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Acknowledgments | |
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Introduction to the Original Edition | |
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Introduction to the Second Edition | |
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How to Use This Book | |
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An Introduction to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving | |
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Amateur Vegetable Breeding | |
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Why every gardener should be a plant breeder | |
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Stories of three amateurs and what they've done | |
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How Much Space Do You Need? How Much Time? | |
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Vegetable breeding can be done on any scale | |
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You can do an elaborate tomato-breeding project in a few half-gallon pots of soil, or a pea-breeding project in a few feet of row | |
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Some projects require only a year or two to produce material that is an improvement over anything available commercially | |
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Roles and Goals for Amateurs; Wish Lists and Wild Ideas | |
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Breeding for flavor. Breeding for size, shape, color, earliness, cold or heat resistance, disease resistance, regional adaptation, yield | |
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Breeding as an expression of individuality, for your tastes and needs | |
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Breeding varieties that do well under organic gardening or farming methods | |
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Breeding new and unusual crops | |
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Discovering popbeans and tiny fast-cooking chickpeas (garbanzos) | |
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Thinking small, thinking big, daring to dream | |
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Finding Germplasm | |
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Obtaining germplasm and information about it | |
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How to work with seed companies, seed saving organizations, and plant science professionals | |
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How to gain access to and use the collections of the USDA-ARS National Plant Germplasm System | |
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Evaluating Germplasm and Experimental Material; Variety Trials and Gardening Research | |
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How to design, conduct, and evaluate garden trials | |
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How to combine trials with production of food and beauty | |
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How to get good information with the least amount of land and labor | |
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Genetics and Plant Parenthood | |
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Sex and the Single Gene; Mendel's Genes | |
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Modern Genes | |
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The Genetic Basis of Seed Saving | |
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Inbreeding and the genetic nature of inbreeding crop varieties | |
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Saving seed from inbreeders | |
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Heirlooms | |
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Outbreeding and the genetic nature of outbreeding crop varieties | |
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Inbreeding depression. Outcrossing and self-incompatibility | |
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Saving seed of outbreeders | |
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Inbreeder or outbreeder - how you can tell? | |
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Saving seed from hybrids | |
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Making and breaking hybrids | |
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Plant Breeding Stories | |
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Popbeans and purple peas | |
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Perennial vegetable buckwheat and perennial lettuce-salsify | |
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Power selection, power inbreeding, crosses, backcrosses, and recurrent backcrossing | |
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'Rainbow Inca' sweet corn Tomatoes, squash, and melons | |
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Bigger, Brighter, and More Beautiful | |
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Creating polyploids | |
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Chromosome doubling using colchicine | |
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Breeding with established polyploids | |
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Fun with Wide Crosses | |
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Crosses between distant relatives within a species | |
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Crosses between different species | |
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Creating entirely new crop species | |
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Happy Accidents | |
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Taking advantage of new mutations, sports, bud sports, and accidental crosses | |
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More cold-hardy fava beans, bigger tomatoes, and giant top-setting onions | |
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Domesticating Wild Plants | |
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Expanding Horizons | |
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Table I 801 Interesting Plants | |
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Vegetables of the world and their wild relatives; | |
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edible plants that have the potential for being developed into vegetables | |
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fruits, nuts, and grains | |
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Scientific names, common names, families, and lifestyles | |
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Basic breeding systems, chromosome numbers, flowering patterns, flower types and modifications, average cross-pollination frequency, major pollen vectors, and incompatibility system information | |
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Recommended isolation distances, seed yields, location in the USDA-ARS National Plant Germplasm System, and references | |
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Seed Saving Practice | |
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An Introduction to Seed Saving | |
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Why save seeds? Seed-saving overview | |
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Saving seed from hybrids. Roles and purposes | |
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Growing Seed | |