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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 | |