Everyone's Pea Projects?

[Tarruvi]

I'm not sure if the pattern can be stabilized, so far the plants that have the blush of color and/or flames exhibit a back and forth on whether or not the pods have color, how much color, and how it's expressed.

Here is one of the Red Podded Project's F2 plants. All 4 of these pods are on the same plant, but the third pod on the second node has the flame pattern while all the rest are bare green. A similar thing is happening to all it's siblings in the project, where some pods develop varying degrees of color.

These yellow pods are in the same boat, with this one only exhibiting a brush of red against other pods on the same plant. If I had to make a guess, it's most probably a heterozygous phenomenon as stated by Steph? I saw a post on another forum discussing pods like this by Galina, on Growing Food Saving Seeds, where Galina had pods doing something similar. They had a purple podded plant (Beauregarde) which started to produce large green pods near the end of the plant's vine. Saved the large green pods off the plant, and those seeds produced more of the same pods from which they originated, the purple genes seemingly gone.

The discussion on that thread then delved into rouge genes, but if this is the act of a rouge gene activating/deactivating, I don't know which. But it could also be that one or a few regular genes have manipulated the purple genes in some way. Whatever the case is, I'm going to label the more colorful pods for further investigation. Maybe the F3s have some hope to be fully pigmented if the antagonizing genes are shuffled out, or, it'll be more of the same next year.

Compared to my purple podded plants, the parent variety of these F2s and the Snow Pea Purple hybrids, the pods immediately started showing pigment before they were the size of a pinky nail. So, if none of the F3s in this Red Podded line follow suit, the line's gonna need to be scrapped. And, the fresh lines I started work on will be the new focus going forward.

[Steph S]

Tarruvi, I did have little splashes of purple on my F1 of Sugar Sprint x Sugar Magnolia.  Not as nice as the 'flames' on yours but similar in principle.  So it can turn up in heterozygous plants (at least with a plain green pod cross).   If it was as simple as co-dominance or penetrant expression of the purple pod gene when heterozygous, then the F2 should have some kind of ratio of purple vs green vs purple splashed to indicate that.   Will keep an eye on it and try to do a count and let you know what I get.

[Tarruvi]

Steph, that does sound like it'll be helpful data to reference when those F2s are counted.

[gmuller]

Hi
been away for half a decade on other projects, but pulled out my pea stud book yesterday.

i've bred 2 full purple snows Jupiter and Delta Dusk, a couple of nice golden snows Joni's Taxi and recently released Venus, a tall, hypertendril golden snow. Both of the yellows could do with the introduction of bigger pod genes.

My red snow project Mars is finished for me - its a co mingling of a couple of red low fibre pod lines with different seed colours.
By chance I also found a very dwarf red snow that reaches about 30cm high, Asteroid.

I might resurrect my red snap projects, i think the early crosses are still in my fridge - tho i minght pass this off to new correspondent who has reinvigorated my interest.

Sadly, we can't/don't ship to the US anymore due to customs seizures at the US postal border.
Screening for flavour is a real issue - particularly if the anthocyanin twang is through a whole line, requiring a fresh round of crosses needing multiple generations to grow out again,

Coloured edible-podded peas have drifted from my attention, but a couple of pie in the sky targets would be finding a large podded sugar snap, and rediscovering the stringless pod genetics.

I would like to find the time to do some work on the salt resistance genetics: my bore water is a bit salty, and with climate change and droughts likely to restrict my access to town water from time to time, this would let me keep growing peas should i want to. I did by chance get some seed of a very salt resistant line, but its probably too old to use now.
gm

[whwoz]

Gmuller, good to hear from you.  Just checked out those peas you mentioned on Useful Seeds, fabulous work, will be getting an order in shortly, and also for that butternut, love the colour of it

[Steph S]

WRT the stringless pods, I believe I recall reading that it's tightly linked to the dwarf habit?
Large podded snaps would be a great project.

My Sugar Sprint/Sugar Magnolia F2 have just started to flower, and curiously four of the first five to flower are white flowered.   Making me wonder if there's an earliness gene linked to the white.
The pods will be small no doubt, but I'm hoping for anything sweet, and will keep an eye out for the stringless trait.   Growth habits in the F2 are all over the place, of course.  Something early that isn't five feet tall before the first pod, but big enough to produce decently, would be nice.

[Steph S]

Well to answer your question about purple splashed pods Tarruvi, here is what I observed in the F2.
All pods were green at emergence, but those with purple genetics quickly became 'splashed' and then completely (or nearly so, allowing for some green tips and under the cotyledons) purple.  It looked like I had a lot of purple pods, but then as they matured and filled with peas the purple faded on the majority of surfaces and became purple splashed or just outlined really with purple.
And at that point it seemed like I had no actually full purple pods.  But on re-examination there is at least one truly purple pod and a couple of others that are still a bit immature but look like they could be fully purple.
The harvested pods in the picture were numbered and then tasted and checked for stringless trait - none of those were particularly sweet and none of the peas I've tried so far have been stringless, including these.
The data sheet is incomplete, as I lost track for a while during heat wave/ wildfires, so the actual total of plants is 45 or 47 I think, however it's enough to get some rough numbers.
About half of the F2s had the heterozygous purple splashing, including the green/white flowered ones.
Only 2 or maybe 3 out of 40 were or possibly are fully purple, which is less than expected for a 1/4 ratio for sure.  I may have misjudged some due to the general loss of color on filling the pod, but I'm pretty certain there are fewer than you would expect for a simple 1/4 ratio, even excluding the green ones.
Sorry the data sheet is so small but at least you can see the color coding for rough numbers.

[Tarruvi]

Awesome Steph, and I believe I understand a little better how some of these genes can shake out. I just wish I had some that developed the solid purple/reds as you did. lol. I also like the spreadsheet there, unfortunately I'm not as organized with numbering plants and keeping data sets. The most I did this year was tie twist ties around all the crosses I made in the garden, and made it a habit to remember who I crossed with who.

Speaking of crosses... I have some of the new purple x yellow F1s growing indoors at the moment, and they should produce pods before the shorter days make growing inside impossible. Other crosses I made may have to wait until next year, but I did squeeze in some parsley pea (mother plant) x salmon flowered (pollen donor) F1s right next to them.

I looked them over, and they have some anthocyanin being produced. A good sign that the cross was successful, as the parsley peas I grew had white flowers and no anthocyanin anywhere on the plant.


My ideal plant in the F2 seeds harvested from these plants would have the parsley leaves, triple flowers (a trait I saw in the parsley mother plant), umbellatum growth habit, and pink or white flowers. The reasoning for all these traits is that I'd honestly want a real funky plant, but it's also out of curiosity. I heard umbellatum type peas develop stronger colonies of nitrogen fixing bacteria. The parsley pea leaves are just cosmetic, but I'd love to see if they have any effect on the growth and health of the plant. While the triple flowered trait will make the flower cluster at the top have more flowers, as much as a 50% increase compared to the double flowers of the salmon flowered peas.

[Steph S]

Tarruvi, I wonder if the parsley leaf would be a deterrent to leaf miners.  Some plants seem to be more affected than others, so resistance or deterrence could be a useful breeding goal besides the interesting look.

I didn't have any plan or organization when I planted the F2, it was come what may.  But I hit on the idea of tagging with a number whenever they flowered.  That gave me a way to track earliness and other traits, which I would never be able to do by memory.  I'm not really selecting for taste at this point but I can't imagine picking a pea to eat and then remembering which stalk it was on LOL.  So I thought this worked well as a way to track individual plants, and I'll retrieve those number tags to use again.

The variety of growth habits is more of interest for selection this year.  We had everything from plants with a first flower way up the vine to a tiny plant only a foot tall with a single pathetic pod.  Also double podded vs single, and some combinations of the two.  I have one white flowered plant that bore a dozen pods in a tight cluster on a lower vine, and there are 4 or 5 heterozygous purple pod plants with similar growth habit but not as many pods.  I'm planning to save those for a line of compact peas that don't require a tall trellis.  Double pods and short internodes makes for a nice concentrated set.
Another trait I noticed this year, some plants are very slow to grow and fill their pods while others are fast.  Granted that the hot and dry conditions may have played a part.  I had snow peas growing on the other end of this trellis and I was so impressed with how fast Golden Sweet put out the pods.  It seems like this pea comes out as 'outstanding' in almost any challenge thrown at it, so it's making its way to the top of the list for future breeding projects.

Would love to see the red pods you're breeding.  I'm wondering though whether the anthocyanin peas are by nature slower to develop.  Or maybe it's just my impatience.

[Tarruvi]

Steph, that does sound like a useful characteristic to deter leaf miners. I have a few plants that get them on occasion, but the leaf miners don't do much damage. I'll have to observe the Parsley x Salmon Flowered F2s to see if they do better to deter them next year.

An update on all the hybrids growing indoors, the soil I used was for some of my old cricket terrariums. A terrible idea, given the soil retained too much moisture and started rotting some of their roots. I replaced the soil with fresh potting soil, and I hope that change will allow them to develop healthier roots. Speaking of the hybrid's roots... Although some plants had their taproots rotted away, they did develop numerous lateral roots coming off the base of where the taproot was. I really don't want to start from square one with these crosses, so I'm hoping they truck through this blunder and set seeds in a few months.


These are the Purple Pod x Yellow Pod F1s sprouted and growing. I'm glad they weren't as bad off as some of the other plants I was growing, the pea varieties that were most affected by the rot were pure seeds and not hybrids. Maybe hybrids are just built different?


This is one of two P. sativum (mother plant) x P. Fulvum (pollen donor) F1s, the seeds that these plants have come from were wrinkled and everything inside like the cotyledon and radicle took up 1/3 the space inside the seed coat. At first I was shocked, but it makes a bit of sense that the stuff developing inside the seed would be small considering the father plant had small seeds. I excised the small plants out of their seeds carefully, and planted them like any other peas. Give or take a few weeks, and now 2 out of 3 of these hybrids sprouted successfully.

[Steph S]

Best of luck with those Tarruvi.  They look healthy now.

I have a question about xenia or 'metaxenia' effects, wondering whether a bee cross with the yellow podded snow pea could explain the reddish color on this pea as shown.  Other peas on the same plant were ordinary purple splashed/heterozygous but this pod here is distinctly reddish vs the purple.

Snow peas are growing on the other side of the same trellis, and I was surprised to see bumblebees on them this year which have never seen before.  The wasps are usually very attentive to the peas but not in a pollinator way.  But strange as it is to see bumbles on the peas, it was even stranger to see them going deliberately to spent flowers instead of fresh ones!  And really digging in there, even where a pea was already starting to form, thus causing some small damages to the peas.  Golden Sweet flowers were very droopy in the heat and scarcely seemed to open at all before pushing out peas. So it's possible they were visited too, although I didn't observe it.  But obviously could not be a pollen parent unless the bees also got into an unselfed flower...   I definitely saw them going to finished flowers multiple times, and that was so unusual it's all I really noticed.

I think there are 3 seeds in this pod and I will grow them regardless just to find out what gives.
No idea what to expect from a snap x snow F1, if it is, or what color I might see from three peas.  Will take a minute to think it through I guess.

[Tarruvi]

Thanks Steph, I'm really rooting for these plants. More importantly, xenia/metaxenia! Xenia explains the P. sativum x P. fulvum seed formation perfectly.

As for your pods, maybe it could be metaxenia? It wouldn't be too farfetched to assume that the embryo would start affecting the mother plant's tissues through released hormones. Although, I'd assume that the yellow pod trait would be nullified by the dominant green genes of the mother plant? It's hard to tell what may be going on with the red coloration, maybe the seeds will have to answer that?

[Steph S]

Yep will definitely be comparing the seeds with other sibs and with Golden Sweet, when the pods have dried down.

[Alex]

Hi guys,
"Most cool-season vegetables don't grow well in our tropical environment. Peas, onions, Irish potatoes, and garlic are a few vegetables that don't grow on Guam." (https://www.guampdn.com/lifestyle/what-vegetables-to-grow-and-when-to-plant-them-on-guam/article_ed250d96-b2da-57e8-862b-a8ad04d02d9e.html).
What are the most heat-resistant pea varieties you would recommend for the tropics?

[Adrian]

Hi Alex,
The mosts tolerant peas at heat are wrinckle peas.
We like growed, kelvedon and oregon sugar pod.