Selection of snow peas

This spring I've grown out a couple of selections of F4 yellow snow peas. I should probably go through the development of these lines, if only to remind my self of what went on.
These were originally grown as a bit of an afterthought along a marginal dry bed next to a half shaded fence. I had returned from a lengthy winter holiday to find a mass of F1 plants with set pods, but because of weather conditions, some of the pods had sprouted or sprouting seeds in them. I just chucked a whole heap of what I thought were ruined seeds into a bed, and got a great germination. The plants struggled, many only setting one or two weak pods, so selection was a bit difficult, but two plants stood out, with big pods, and vigour.
I bulk collected the yellows, and individually bagged the good plants, and grew them out.

Green Mountain Potato Onion Seedling progress

Last autumn I planted my seed of Kelly Winterton's potato onions. Kelly developed a huge potato onion from a variety that he had been growing for a number of years. When it started flowering, he collected seed, grew it out, and got a lot of diversity, but some of these were enormous, a great discovery since most potato onions are quite small. It's worth reading his online info, which I've linked.

My Green Mountain F1 plants are showing lots of diversity.
Some plants are just growing big onions, and aren't showing any sign of dividing or flowering.

Others have one or two divisions

Some have divided multiple times

And one very strange one has divided 5 or 6 times, and each division is now in the process of dividing again, giving what looks like 28 or so individual stalks, with a crazy Medusa-like tangle of leaves and stalks.

I'm hoping I get some Green Mountain-like big spud onions, but this multiple-bunching characteristic could be useful. Will need to see how it develops over summer.

Another plus from this batch is that a few of them are setting flower buds, giving the possibility of even more diversity - if they set seed and I can get them to grow.

Harvesting and selecting yellow snow peas

This spring I've grown out a couple of selections of F4 yellow snow peas. I should probably go through the development of these lines, if only to remind myself of what went on.

These were originally grown as a bit of an afterthought along a marginal dry bed next to a half shaded fence. I had returned from a lengthy winter holiday to find a mass of F1 plants with set pods, but because of weather conditions, some of the pods had sprouted or sprouting seeds in them. I just chucked a whole heap of what I thought were ruined seeds into a bed, and got a great germination.

The plants struggled, many only setting one or two weak pods, so selection was a bit difficult, but a few plants stood out, with big pods, and vigour. I bulk collected the yellows, and individually bagged the good plants, and grew them out in March 2013, along with 2 seeds from each of the rest of the yellows. This was not a great strategy - autumn weather didn't give me the great seed crops I had got the year before, and I was away on another extended break, and wasn't around to do a proper assessment. Luckly a friend collected and bagged the seeds for me.

This spring 2013, I sowed seed from some of the offspring of the best F2 plants as well as a couple of seeds from all the other yellows. This has given me a lot of plants to choose from, including some unlikely and subtle variations in the phenotypes.

So how to go about selecting from this big pool of candidates? I certainly don't have room to grow out another mass planting, and I'm probably far enough along the generation pipeline for some of the characteristics to begin to show some stability.

Since these plants are being grown to eat, flavour is a major factor. But I didn't select the parents based on their outstanding flavour - I rushed in, and just crossed everything with everything else, just to get started. A bit less haste might have been a good thing. So the flavour of these crosses isn't remarkable, just standard snowpea. Anything with chalky or dry-mouth feel is rejected. Which still leaves a large number of individuals to select from.

I've begun to think along commercial lines - what would reduce labour costs for someone growing yellow snow peas? In the first place, coloured snows are useful for anyone hand harvesting since the peas stand out from the foliage. But there is another characteristic which makes them stand out - literally.

Medium sized peduncle on my Tall Yellow Snow F4 growouts

The peduncle is the stalk that attaches the flower and pod to the stem of the branch. If these are long, the pods are held away from the foliage, making detection of the pods easier. And double flowering at each node also make the task of gathering pods easier, so if I could find plants with long peduncles and/or double flowering, this would be a useful characteristic.
 The pics also show the light weight aluminium tags I use to label plants and crossed flowers - the embossing lasts even if the ink fades.

The background mesh is 10 centimetre squares

As luck would have it, there was considerable variation in peduncle length, from about 1 centimetre long, to almost 10 centimetres.  Unfortunately there weren't any double flowers in the main F4 crop, but there were some in my F2 growouts of another line, my Golden Spring project which I wrote about in one of my recent posts. But the Golden Spring lines went in late, and there was no opportunity to cross the two yellow snow lines together to combine characteristics. Next season.

The double flowered characteristic showed up  on some of my purple snow growouts - you can also see how the purple pods really stand out from the green of the foliage.

Contemplating new pea crosses

tMy target yellow snow pea is a dwarf, double flowered, powdery mildew-resistant, sweet, big-podded pea.
My F4 plants of Tall Yellow Snow, a cross between Golden Podded and what I think was Yakumo, are just producing their first pods. But they aren't double flowered, nor disease resistant.

But one of my purple snow pea crosses Delta Louisa X Chamber of Death produced a double flowered green podded F2 that was tall, highly disease resistant, and with huge pods. I'm growing some of F3s of this plant just to see what happens - it was such an outstanding plant last year that I had to grow it out, even tho it was never going to produce coloured pods. Of the twelve of so F3 plants I'm growing, four are dwarfs. If they produce big pods, they might be likely candidates for a cross to the Tall Yellow Snows.

This would make a good cross since the two genes for powdery mildew resistance are both recessive, and the two multi-flower genes (doesn't matter which one I get) are also recessive, as are all the dwarfing genes - again, it doesn't really matter which ones I get.

I'm also wondering which way to do the cross - the usual plan is to do a cross so that the F1 plants show if the cross was successful. For example, when crossing a tall (dominant) to a dwarf (recessive), put the tall pollen on the dwarf flower, and if the cross pollination was successful, the F1 plants will be tall since the F1s should be heterozygous for tall. If however the F1s are dwarf, this indicates that the cross was not successful, and the dwarf plant has pollinated itself in the normal way. This is useful since it saves you from growing out unsuccessful crosses for two generations, (the population starts segregating in the F2 generation).

However there is the issue of maternal cytoplasmic DNA. This resides in the mitochondria and chloroplasts, the power machinery of the cell, rather than in the nucleus, and is only passed down in the maternal line. So if you are after robustness, then using the robust plant as the mother makes sense - it might be connected with the cytoplasmic genetic material so it's a good way of hedging your bets.

So today I'll be out in the vege gardens, looking for flowers that are just at the right stage of maturity.

A community breeding project - the Golden Spring growout

Cooperative breeding

I’ve got too many lines of peas to explore- -the flurry of crosses I did when I first realised I could cross peas resulted in about 30 or 40 seeds to grow into F1 plants. But these F1 plants produce hundreds of F2 seed, across 5 or 6 various lines – too many to grow. I just selected a couple of the lines to grow out, and have been sitting on these bags of F2 seed, that hold some interesting genetic potential, with no space to explore them.

A correspondent (Damien) answered one of my whinging complaints by offering to grow some for me. Preposterous! My precious F2 seed? No way…

But I gave it some more thought, pondered, then cautiously asked for volunteers on the garden forum I frequent, Ozgrow, to help with one of the F2 lines, Golden Spring, a cross between Golden Podded and Oregon Spring. So AllyH, Raymondo, Aussiejumbo and Damien are now on board as F2 growout-ers. Get sowing folks.

As alike as two peas in pod – not.

I’ve posted before about the smart way to choose female and male parents when performing a cross between two varieties with one parent dominant and the other recessive in a particular gene, so you can check the certainty of a real cross in the F1 generation, instead of having to wait until the phenotypes start expressing in the F2 generation.

But what if the phenotype doesn’t exhibit classic dominant/recessive inheritance? A couple of weeks ago I found just such an occurrence that helped me sort out a mix up in one of my F1 pea crosses.

I want to introduce the hypertendril/semi-leafless trait into snow peas. This trait is widely used in field peas, where trellising isn’t an option. These plants develop extra tendrils, which grow together, and in dwarf or semidwarf peas helps them to knit together into a self-supporting tangle that reduces lodging (falling over). In the home garden this will minimize the need for trellising –  andanything that reduces maintenance is a good thing. Semi-leafless is a recessive trait, so I crossed male pollen from Delta Louisa into the female flower of Kaspa the field pea. But when I grew the F1 seeds out, two of the six or so seedlings were hypertendril. Strange.

Hypertendril on right, normal on left

 

My  only explanation is that the Kaspa flower had just started to shed pollen when I crossed it, so a couple of the ovaries in that pod must have selfed with Kaspa pollen.

A further bit of evidence was the leaf margins. Kaspa has toothed edges to the leaves, Delta Louisa is smooth. The two hypertendril “F1”s (that weren’t) had toothed leaves, but the other F1s (the real deal) had slightly toothed edges. This suggested toothed leaf edges exhibits intermediate inheritance, a trait that helped me sort out this mixed up cross in the F1.



Toothed margin on right, slightly toothed on left


 

 

But I am growing out the two hypertendril F1s, just to see…

A potato onion update

In autumn I sowed some of the precious Green Mountain potato onion seed I got from Kelly Winterton. Some went in the garden before I left on holidays, but I hedged my bets and put 5 in a pot and took it to my mum's for safekeeping over winter.
The garden grown ones are lost - I either forgot to label them, or the labels have come out. I will be keeping a close eye on the multiplying onion plot, which is where I suspect they are lurking, but I just potted up the 5 advanced overwinter plants to grow on in the hothouse, and sowed the rest of Kelly's seed, around 30 seeds. Here's hoping.
T