26 May 2015

First of the Jupiter pods

It's now 72 days after sowing, and the first of the little purple pods are forming on the greenhouse plants - the outside plants despite being about half the size, are only a week or so behind. The greenhouse plants are also showing signs of multiple branching beginning.


15 May 2015

Purple snow pea 'Jupiter' growout

On 13 March i sowed seeds of my resistant purple snow pea, now dubbed 'Jupiter'. About 40 seeds went into foam boxes in the green house, with around 60 seeds going into peat pots, which were then transplanted to an outside bed.
Today, 15 May, the inside plants are nearly twice as high as the outside plants. A few days ago i inspected the growing tips and saw some tiny flower buds on the greenhouse plants. Today i checked the outside plants 0 these are showing buds too. Seems the number of days to maturity is not driven by growing temperatures, at least in autumn.
This trial and seed increase should give me a couple things - enough seed to sow a good crop in spring and harvest a few pods for testing and sharing, a chance to compare yields inside and out, and a couple of chances to test for disease resistance in different 'climates'.
greenhouse Jupiter, 61 days from sowing
Outside Jupiter, 61 days

the lovely purple dusted calyx


Semi-leafless coloured pea progress

The plan was to germinate the F2 seeds, whereupon the semi-leafless seedlings would show up at the second leaf stage, cull the normals and grow out the semi-lefless ones, looking for dwarfing, coloured pods, and mange tout (snow pea) pods.
Best laid plans...
The cross of my Yellow podded with Lacy Lady only gave seedlings with distorted leaflets - curious.
So I sowed another seed lot from a different cross - this time a semi-leafless field pea, Mukta, with an early generation of my Yellow Snow project.

Relief, they showed 7 semi=leafless F2 seedlings out of 55 germinated - about 1 in 8, so only half as many as I would have expected if this was a simple recessive trait controlled by the semi-leafless gene, af as noted on the John Innes pisum database.
I've planted out the semi=leafless seedlings, 5 talls, and 2 with one of the dwarfing genes into foam boxes in the greenhouse.
Tall semi-leafless seedlings

Dwarf semi-leafless seedlings