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.

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

Semi-leafless or hypertendril coloured peas

The hypertendril or semi-leafless trait in peas exhibits extensive tendril formation when some of the leaves on normal peas are replaced my tendrils. The smaller leaf area on the plant allows for more air movement, supposedly reducing damp-caused diseases. Another bonus is the plants are relatively self-supporting, particularly if one f the dwarfing genes is also involved. This is an advantage to the home gardener - and farmer - since there is no need for extensive trellises.
An added bonus reported on the Mudflower blog is the reduced need for supplemental watering.

Damien from Mudflower really likes Lacy Lady, a dwarf or semi-dwarf green shelling pea of good flavour, exhibiting the semi-leafless trait, and was kind enough to send me some of his seed which I crossed to one of my yellow podded snowpea lines. Unfortunately is was only an F3 line of yellows, which went on to exhibit considerable variability in my community breeding project growouts, so not the perfect parent, but it was the only thing flowering at the time. I subsequently grew out the F1 seed of the Golden Spring F3 X Lacy Lady cross to yield a couple of hundred F2 seeds.
Today I've soaked 100 of these seeds.

The plan is pot these on when they germinate, then look for semi-leafless which shows up after the first couple of leaves, and cull anything not semi-leafless. Theoretically I should get about one quarter = 25 semileafless plants, of which one quarter = 6 should be yellow. With a bit of luck, one quarter of these should have some reduced fibre (one of the two snowpea genes), but it seems unlikely, unless the ghost of Mendel is smiling upon me, that I would get a full yellow semi-leafless snow at the F2 generation. Here's hoping.

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...

Potato Onions - second season progress

I posted earlier about potato onions, and my progress with the seedlings.
Last April, austral autumn, I replanted all the cluster or 'nests' of each onion that grew from each individual seedling, and that had survived the storage over winter - ten siblings in all, some from spring sown, and some from autumn sown seeds. I planted them 'nest to row', that is, each original seedling's secondary bulbs were planted in a separate row, so all the production out of that row was the result of two seasons of growth from the individual seedling. The Autumn seedlings and spring seedlings were planted in separate patches, but after a whole season's growth, this didn't seem to have much affect on overall production, although the autumn sown 'parents' did seem to flower a couple of weeks earlier.
These were planted at garden number 2, where for a variety of reasons they got little in the way of care - water was infrequent, and virtually stopped mid-summer.

The pictures below show the results of harvest of each row - that is, each pile or bag of onions represents all the production from 2 growing years of one seedling. Colours, shapes, and productivity varied markedly, but every plant flowered producing copious seeds, most of which got collected and has been forwarded to a number of growers to try.

Some varieties were way more susceptible to rots - although how rot set in in this driest of summers is beyond me.

Nice producer on left, diseased underperformer right

marked differences in productivity

Different colours

Left, my first selection - if it's got long storage

Left, another selected keeper, but right is the result of growing out one huge, single bulb seedling. this is special, and will be nurtured

Just for comparison, a picture of the growout of one-season seedlings - again, considerable diversity. Each cluster or single bulb is the result of one year of growth.

There are also some of these misbehaving - some are still growing madly, and some have reverted to what look like clusters of perpetual onions.

And one big flat brown single bulb, that doesn't seem to want to stop growing, that might hold great potential.

And one strange individual, worthy of separate post...

Autumn 2015 projects - resetting priorities

It has been a shocking summer for vegetable growing - and breeding. Very hot start to spring with little or no rain, then cool early summer, a single rain event, and a coolish end to summer. Tomatoes - which have been on the backburner breeding wise since my forays into dwarf Jaune Flammee - have been very unproductive. I've been wanting to cross OSU Blue to Japanese Black Trifele, looking for a better blue tomato, but the two adequate tomatoes this year were Black and Brown Boar and Brads Black Heart, suggesting they might be good parents.

left to right - Black and Brown Boar, Brads Black Heart, Japanese Black Trifele, and OSU Blue.

 All abit under-ripe

Since the tomato season is almost over, and flowers relatively few, I'd better get onto it soon if I'm going to get a ripe fruit by early winter. Plan would then be to grow out an F1 single fruit over winter, and start looking through the F2s next summer. OSU is still flowering, but the rest have finished, so i might need to go and get some pollen from some other plants I've got growing at my second, soon to be eliminated, garden. The owner needs the room for drainage works, so a salvage operation over the next couple of weeks is in order. Roots, onions and tubers including my saffron patch will need to be dug up and stored.


The parsnip project is looking hard. With only a small suburban garden, growing out sufficient roots for assessment then selection means lots of overcrowding and chances of genetic bottlenecking. One big patch of seeding snips were collected, but circumstances prevented timely processing, and most have rotted. I put the root in the bags with the seed so i could cull the off types, but ended up making everything so damp it all went mouldy. There are a few patches of other selections still with green seed, so if i can find space they might go in. By chance, a volunteer parsnip I dug up while cleaning up a bed had a lovely short stubby form, so has been transplanted into a corner hoping for seed sometime...

The purple round carrot project is also stalled. Root selection was delayed in winter, replantings of survivors went into an isolated corner with low survival, and the three that did seed where mauve skinned, but white fleshed, although mostly stumpy in form. A second patch has produced a little seed from half a dozen plants, but the deep purple carrots I got hoping to cross back to my breeding crosses were grown in a foam box in the shade to survive my late summer absence,and don't look like flowering this autumn. There isn't much seed of this left, so I'm relying on some seed to keep some of the genetics. A few volunteers in odd beds seem to have dark shoulders, but are also reluctant to flower, so not sure where this project will go.
But the search for a better potato onion will continue - post to follow soon...