Genetics 102

Mr. Elkskin, I appreciate you crawling out of the woodwork.  It is my goal to encourage more people to become involved. 
 
Your line of thinking is definately headed in the right direction.  By continually selfing a pumpkin, you increase the chances of producing offspring with recessive genes. How is this so?  Recessive traits are repressed from expression by dominant traits.  Here is my purely hypothetical situation used for demonstration purposes only...
 
Let's say Mr. Mombert's 567.5 has a recessive trait for huge pumpkin production.  Let's also say this is a rare occurence, which not many pumpkins have.  Soooooooo,,,,,, when you cross this with most other pumpkins, which have a dominant trait for average offspring production, the dominant trait wins, thus producing an average pumpkin.  Now, when you self Mr. Mombert's pumpkin, you combine a recessive trait with a recessive trait.  Since there are no dominant traits involved, the recessive trait will be expressed, which in this case is a huge pumpkin. 
 
In real biology, it is much more complicated and with many more factors coming into play, but this is the basic idea behind Mendelian genetics. 
 The trick is to observe which traits may be recessive, and then cross pumpkins with the observed recessive traits with each other. 
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