Potato Onions - a strange seedling

Spud onions reproduce vegetatively - plant one bulb, it divides, and produces multiple bulbs at the end of the season. They aren't supposed to flower, but Kelly Winterton got them to, and distributed seed.
One of my seedlings this year has produced a quite unusual reproductive strategy - it has divided at the base, flowered in its first year and produced seeds,  and also produced topsets!
The plant in question is just above the blades of the secateurs in this picture. note thick wrappers, and divided bulb.

 But I noticed a seedhead on the top - unusual since I didn't get this from one season old seedlings last year. A closer look revealed small topset onions forming - lower left below.

 And in the seedhead, maturing capsules, and some mature seed. Not sure how to deal with this baby...

Short coloured carrot project progress

I mixed up a collection of coloured carrots and got them to cross, and grew out the F1 seed last autumn. This gave a range of tinted carrots, mostly pale with some purples mauves and pinks. All the coloured roots were dug up and planted in a small tight patch, along with some French Rounds in an attempt to get some crosses between the coloureds and the rounds. And a couple of Baby variety, from a restricted self seeded population that were in the garden got into the mix as well, just to add a bit of diversity. I also planted a shop bought deep purple carrot. I tried to keep a bit of order to the plantings but they did get a bit mixed.

These have all gone to seed over summer, and I've sorted the plants according to root shape and depth of remnant colour - in some cases its difficult to tell what the original carrot was like, but I've given it my best shot.

Carrots produce a lot of seed. I don't know what I'm going to do with the excess. I've only got room for a fairly limited growout, so I will only be sowing seed from the more deeply coloured roots, and some of the French rounds. That leaves heaps of potentially crossed up seed, that I don't have the room for.

Parsnip progress

A while since I posted - gardening takes time.
Finally the seeds on my Short Fat Parsnip parents are ready. The Halblange and De Gurnesey have set seed synchronously, but the Kral, and the late-planted Melbourne Whiteskin have been tardy. This has implications for parsnip breeding, since the trigger for flowering is presumably day length - manipulating these varieties so that they flower together will take a bit more thought than say for corn, where you can stagger planting times. Don't think that will work for a biennial. But I think there has been sufficient overlap in flowering to allow some cross pollination.

But this difference in flowering times has further implications. Accepted advice when seed collecting is to harvest the best seed. In the case of parsnips, it looks like the first umbels have the best seed. And recall that parsnips need a big gene pool for a healthy breeding population. So in a perfect world I would collect the seed from the first umbels of all four varieties I'm growing.  But the first umbels on the early flowerers won't have crossed with the later varieties. So I've seperately bagged the seeds from what I hope are contemporaneous seed heads - the earliest from the Kral and Melbourne Whiteskin, and the second pick from HLW and DG which started flowering earlier.

On another note, the second sowing of Kral which took place in early Spring has survived the record dry, but a number of plants have started to send up flower spikes. This presents me with a dilemma - do I havest this seed (which might develop too late in the season anyway) or do I reject this seed, since it comes from individuals that are prone to annualism rather than biennialism? I don't wish to encourage genetics that allow the parsnips to bolt in one season - I might end up with a population of bolters, giving lots of early seed, but no parsnips to eat!

Below, a picture of the DG (left) and HLW (right) parsnips I pulled after harvesting the seeds.
The HLW has tubbier tubers, so closer to my desired target.

First parsnip seed

My parsips are finally seeding, the heads drying down, and yesterday I harvested the first seeds.
The 4 varieties in the first sowing haven't all flowered or seeded together, though. Halblange Weiss and de Guernsey flowering earlier than the Kral - of which I have only half a dozen plants surviving. My late sowing of Melbourne Whiteskin, which replaced a failed Kral sowing from a different seed source, is also late in setting seed.

This difference in flowering times is a bit problematic - the early seeds from the Halblange and de Guernsey will most likely have only crossed with each other, and my plan was to get a cross with the fat-rooted Kral. The seeds from the Kral are likely to have crossed with the later flowers of the other three varieties, but half a dozen plants makes for a narrow genetic base.

My plan is to harvest the late seed from the Halblange and de Guernsey, and the earliest seed from the Kral, hoping these will have crossed up, and collecting the seed from each variety separately.

It's been the driest spring/summer on record for Bendigo, and it 's been a real struggle to keep anything alive, but the breeding stock has got most of the attention, with my tomatoes now only sad dry sticks.

So just as I want some dry weather to ripen seed, it decides to rain! Gotta love nature...

Purple podded pea - first F2 line

November 2011 - crossed the first snows and purple poddeds.
Seeds in December 2012. Some sown green on 3rd December - straight out of the mature pod - for a summer shade growout.
One line PP(LSC)XPFM produced about 20 F2 seeds from three greenseed plants harvested on 4 March. These were then sown  - can't remeber if it was green or if I dried them first, but they were planted as seedlings on 25 March.

The original F1 seeds from the first crossed were sown on the 16 February. and planted out on 28 February.

These February sowings were producing fertilised pods in late April, but the early March sowings didn't produce pods until late winter. What a difference a couple of weeks makes.

The later sowings were badly affected by powdery mildew, and by the time they were flowering, many of the plants were so infected that they only produced a few viable pods, some of which were then stripped of their seed by rats or mice.

But I did get one snow pea with colour - a half purple snow. A quick chew on one end of a pod showed it to be sweet and tasty - a bonus. However at seed harvest I only managed to get around 10 seeds. I took the risk, and sowed 3 of them straight away, and have got three F3 plants growing out as tiny seedlings in a tray.

These should be stable for snow pea characteristics - those traits are recessive - but the purpleness is another matter. There is a 2/3 chance the original plant shown above was heterozygous for purple, and 1/3 chance it will be homozygous and stable.

If it was homozygous, I would expect all 3 of the new seedlings to be purple snows - if it is heterozygous, then there is a 3/4 chance that any one of these will be purple.
Oh, the anticipation!