Everyone's Pea Projects?

[AndrewB]

Tarruvi, congratulations!

Mike, you have something special there! I've been waiting years to see a dwarf faciated pea like that!

[Tarruvi]

The Red-Podded F3 peas in my project are doing well, and have 5 mature pods between the 3 plants.

The photos on the left are in shade, while the photos on the right are in sunlight.

Plant 1 is the prettiest of the trio, with a red hue that persisted into maturity like it's parent that grew in the windowsill this spring. Only downside is that it has just this one pod. lol

Plant 2 is the darkest one, with blueish purple pods that were once red. It also has constricted pods, I hear that is a good trait to look out for when picking fibreless pods. So, I may want to take care in saving the seeds from it for that trait alone. I may even want to cross the offspring from this plant with Plant 1's offspring to get the best traits from both mixed together. This plant may have come from the purple siblings of the windowsill red-podded pea.

Plant 3 has it's hue in the middle, with a reddish purple. The pods are like Plant 1's pod, plump with a possibility of hard fibers. I'm not too interested in it, but I'd be mad not to save the seeds in case they turn out good in one way or another. This plant may have also come from the purple siblings of the windowsill red-podded pea.


Red-Podded peas aside, I occasionally smell the pea flowers in my garden to see if any produce a noticeable perfume. Most of them are scentless, which is typical for a crop grown only for the dinnerplate. But, a select few that I have in my breeding projects have varying fragrant notes and intensities. Changing depending on how old the flowers are, smelling a lot like purple leaf plum flowers on older blooms, while fresh flowers smell like sweet roses. I tagged a few strong smelling plants for seed saving, and I hope I could somehow coax those hybrids into becoming a nice fragrant variety?


This is my Yellow-Seeded Triple Flowered F2 Pea, it only produced 3 flowers on this node. All other nodes have 2 flowers. But, it's still a welcome sight as I'd need it for some other breeding projects. Most being ornamental, others to see if they could produce more produce as a result of the trait. Maybe if it were paired with the large pods of green beauty?

[Carol Deppe]

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.
gm

There actually is a large-podded and very productive Sugar snap. But it didn't get named or called a sugar snap pea.

The distinctive differences between a snow pea and a snap pea are three. The snap pea has sweet wrinkled seeds so the pods may be harvested and are harvested when the seeds are full size. The pods are round instead of flat in cross section. And the walls of the pods are unusually thick.

Oregon Giant Sugar, bred by the late great Oregon State University plant breeder Jim Baggett, has the wrinkled seeds and edible pods with low fiber. AND THE THICK-WALLED POD WALLS. They taste like sugar snap pods. However the pods are flat instead of round in cross section. And they are huge compared with SugarSnap. Pods are up to about 5" long and nearly an inch widep
, and usually two per node. I'd guess the pods are about twice the weight of Sugar Snap pods. I call this type of pod Flat Snaps. I invite any who want to to use that name with such pods.

Oregon Giant Sugar can be planted here in maritime Oregon from February breaks in weather to early August to produce pods from July till hard freezes in October. This is possible because Jim bred three critical disease resistance genes into OGS that made it possible to expand the pea season to the entire summer in maritime Oregon: pea wilt (fusarium), powdery mildew, and pea enation mosaic virus. PEMV is mostly a problem only in the maritime NW. OGS can also be planted in mid October and overwintered. I presoak seed when planting in feb or oct. I drain seeds and mix them with dry soil to make them easier to handle. I have found that my summer plantings of peas are a lot happier if they have partial shade on their roots. Igrow secession plantings of peas by sowing a wide row in a circle and supporting the row with a large commercial tomato cage.

OGS also has the virtue that after the seeds reach full size so the pods are at maximal sweetness, the pods stop maturing for a day or two before beginning to dry down. So it is easier to pick the pods at absolute prime. Here in Oregon, with our cold nights, its best to pick on days when there has been some direct sun, and after the pods have had some sun on them. Never in the morning. If put in a plastic bag and refrigerated they stay prime about three days. If picked in the morning they are way less sweet.

OGS has one string substantial enough to warrant removing. I usually pick by snapping pods off leaving the stem end of the pod and the string on the vine. OGS is about 4 to 5 feet tall. Leaves are huge.

The photo shows a summer planting of Oregon Giant Sugar in accessible edges of a squash kale jungle. The squash was planted by weeding spots for hills in a field that had grown a kale seed crop the year before. Nearly 100% of my weeds the following spring were kale from the dropped seed.. I left most of the kale and let the kale and squash fight it out. Every week or so I added another ring of peas. By fall the squash had mostly overgrown the kale. After the squash was harvested and died back I had a nice overwintering kale patch. And no need to do a fall tilling.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/caroldeppe/15789700602/in/photostream/[/img

[Steph S]

That's new to me about Oregon Giant Sugar having the thick walls of a snap! 
Just had a look for seeds and the listings are for "Oregon Giant Snow" and "Oregon Sugar Pod".   Not sure which is the flat snap.
It's interesting that a few classic great commercial peas have just occupied a market niche for decades never losing popularity and besting all challengers.  Sugar Snap or Super SS, and the Oregons.
So I have tended to ignore them, but with all those disease resistances and other advantages, maybe better to breed with them instead.

Biggest regret of my season is having no peas.  Trellis by the house got winter crushed and a bad shoulder couldn't rebuild in the spring.  I just bought some Norli that are 47 days dwarf hoping for a few late pods after garlic just pulled, but the only bed that didn't have fusarium rot is pretty shady and animal accessible end of the garden, half colonized by lemon balm seed that was part of the straw mulch..  I think I'll put them in anyway with a row cover and see what happens. 

I love the idea of a flat snap, with all the genetics of interest, your grow out can only be delicious... My purple podded Sugar magnolia/Sugar Sprint snaps were fairly small and not that vigorous or early, so I would definitely consider a side cross with the mighty Oregon Sugar.

[Carol Deppe]

The name of Jim Baggett's pea is Oregon Giant Sugar. You can buy it from Nichol's Garden Nursery. That's the one that is what I am proposing is a new category, to be called flat snaps. Baggett's variety Oregon Sugar Pod II is a snow pea with unwrinkled seed, not a flat snap. It does not have thick walls on pods. I think this variety would be selling much better if Baggett had realized he had created a new market class and named it Oregon Giant Flatsnap.

I think the Kapular snow and snap peas could all be improved by crossing to Oregon Giant Sugar and looking for segregants in the F2s. (I'm not planning on doing that myself, as I am pretty happy with Oregon Giant Sugar flat. And pea breeding is frustrating here in Willamette Valley Oregon, where so much of the dry seed is destroyed by weavils.)



You can tell pea enation virus on the plants because the pods have little disfiguring bumps on them. You can tell powdery mildew because the entire plant including pods becomes covered with it. Obvious and unappetizing. With fusarium wilt peas look unhappy. Fail to germinate or germinate and grow poorly, or wilt and die. Can be very variable in expression. Wide spread enough to have a major impact on pea canning industry in NE.

[AndrewB]

The Kapulers at peace seedlings have a new giant snap pea. I haven't grown it yet,  but it sounds intriguing.

I have been wondering for years if Bijou/ Carouby de Massaune/ Green Beauty crossed with a true snap would produce a large snap.