Reddit reviews Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's and Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving, 2nd Edition: The Gardener's and Farmers Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving

If you want to breed veggies you want to breed sth. that you personally like eating (because you will need to taste all the trial grow outs), or sth. that doesn't exist yet.I grow dwarf tomatoes for window boxes and urban gardening that do not exist in Germany yet, black ones with old school flavours etc. The available varieties have little to no taste. In the US there are such varieties but not here. I also try to grow my own Pak Choi variety, a large green one that is hardy to both heat and very low temperatures, so I can grow it almost all season. Pak Choi is very expensive around here, and so I want to create a nice variety for the home gardener. I do some corn and potato breeding aswell, but this needs too much space, I am very limited at the moment.Secondly there are plants that are easier to breed than others. Or that need a higher number of individuals and thus much more space. The easiest plants to breed are such that are self-fertile and do not show inbreeding depression. Tomatoes and Chillies for example. Because if you want to stabilize a variety you need to make all your plants look the same, have the same genes. The fastest way to achieve this is by pollinating the plants with themselves, grow out the seeds, select what your looking for, take the self-pollinated seeds from this plant, grow them out again , select again... and so on. With every generation the traits become more and more stable, all the seeds from these plants look more and more alike. Corn for example is more difficult, because they quite quickly suffer from inbreeding depression. In other words, if you pollinate the plant with itself too much, or you just have too few plants to cross it with (a small gene pool) then the plants basically go retarded, their growth stunts, the fruit do not develop properly, they get sick. So here you need a higher number of individuals because they need to be outcrossed, somewhere between 100 and 500 individual plants, so this would need a small field already. Also, you would need to control pollination with bags and such, so they do not pollinate themselves, or get pollinated by plants from a field nearby that would destroy your efforts.

Another thing that can give you quick results are plants who are usually propagated by clones. Things you do not multiply from seed. Strawberries or potatoes for example. For example, If you want to make your own potato variety then, all you need to find are two compatible potatoe varieties that can produce viable seeds (many varieties have lost this ability) then you grow them into plants, and then you can plant the resulting small tubers for another generation and taste test them. If by chance, and there is large variability in potatoes because most are tetraploid, you created a variety that you really like then you do not need to stabilize the variety at all, just plant and multiply the potatoe tubers. They are literally clones of your first plant.

So yeah, there is alot to read about selection methods, pollination tactics, genetics... I heard good things about a book I might buy myself one day called "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's and Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving, 2nd Edition" by Carol Deppe" , that's a good start I think. Other than that just pick sth. you like and find out how it is being bred professionally, all plants have their unique quirks and need different strategies to be bred.