03 November 2011

Adventures with Mendel: vegetable breeding projects

Last year, I grew out some dwarf tomato breeding lines for the Dwarf Project, an amateur breeding program to develop a greater range of dwarf tomatoes.
I got interested in breeding vegetable varieties, read Carol Deppes's "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties" and was hooked.
So this spring I sowed a couple of dozen pea varieties to start another breeding project looking for some different coloured snow peas. Its possible to buy yellow podded (and now purple podded) snow peas in the northern hemisphere - they just can't be easily imported into Australia.
A UK seed company has devveloped a purple podded snow pea, and Rebsie Fairholm an amateur breeder in the UK has developed a red podded pea, and is trying to get a red podded snow pea.
More on the genetics in a later post.

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