Telephone x Unity

[Silverleaf]

Another cross for the Rainbow Pea project, also made in 2014.

I've talked about crimson-flowered Unity in this thread http://www.growingfoodsavingseeds.co...136-ra-x-unity, and white-flowed Telephone here http://www.growingfoodsavingseeds.co...lephone-x-haka.

The cross is almost exactly the same as Telephone x Haka, except we're looking at a different flower colour - crimson, in this case. I'll select in the same way too, culling short plants and white plants. About 3/64 of the F2 will be tall and crimson, and again I'm growing about 100 plants.

[Galina]

Crimson is such a lovely colour. Best of luck.

[jayb]

These are going to be so pretty, good capturing

[Silverleaf]

Thanks! The crimson is one of my favourites. Really looking forward to seeing it again this year.

[jayb]

I loved the colour too.

The crimson is one of my favourites. Really looking forward to seeing it again this year.

I bet

I crossed Alderman with Unity last year, Alderman being about my most favourite pea. I'm thinking they should follow in the footsteps of this cross quite closely?

[Silverleaf]

Yes, absolutely, since Telephone and Alderman are pretty similar. I'd forgotten you made that cross! Dying to see what comes of it...

[Silverleaf]

A couple of these have flowered purple, but then this one turned up today!

Unfortunately it's not a tall plant (looks like it'll be 1m or so like Unity) but I'm happy to see crimson flowers.

[Galina]

How many F2 plants are actually growing this year Silverleaf? Hope you will get a tall one. At least Unity is taller than most short plants. Mine are now approaching 4ft and still growing, Maybe they will make 5ft plus, which is a very useable height.

[Galina]

Just to comment on Unity - I would call this a normal tall pea plant. Plant height in peas is very much daylight dependent. And if you sow very early you get the tallest plants, because they stretch higher. If you sow mid summer, the plants are shorter generally. I know that you both sowed after me which could account for the fact that Unity might have been thought of as a short pea.

[Silverleaf]

That absolutely makes sense! The first year I grew Unity I did sow it very late.

[Silverleaf]

I'd be happy with 4-5ft.

I'm growing 6 different batches of F2s right now, and might add a 7th if I get round to it. I don't have nearly as many plants as I'd like, but hopefully luck will be on my side!

[Silverleaf]

I have at least 3 crimson plants in this batch, so yay! One of them is about 5ft now so maybe it'll get even bigger...

[Galina]

Glad this one is working out YaY!

[Silverleaf]

Just realised there are two flower shapes here. The first pic is the shape I associate with Unity - longer standards and frilly edges to all the petals, and the second is more smooth and rounded.

[Galina]

I'd agree with that observation. All my Unity have frilly edges and the standards have a 'hangdog' look about them too.

[Silverleaf]

More and more crimson plants are revealing themselves so I should have a nice varied group of F3s. I've been lucky, because there seems to be more crimson than anything else! Only one white-flowered plant too. And everything is at least medium-tall, and there are some with flowers in pairs. Very happy!

I'll eat the peas from the white plant and save seeds from crimsons. I was planning to save the purples to to act as a kind of emergency backup (because about 2/3 of them will be heterozygous for crimson) but since I have quite a few crimsons I might not bother with the backup at all.

[Silverleaf]

In case you're wondering how I'm growing and keeping track of these, they are happily tangling together in a short but wide row (1m x 0.2m) just like the ordinary peas I'm growing for food. At this stage I literally only care what colour the flowers are, so there are three phenotypes to distinguish from each other - crimson, wild type, and white. I've been marking every crimson flower (or pair of flowers) with a piece of red yarn so I know which pods to save, and I'm marking the white flowers with white yarn so I know I can eat them. I can tell which are the wild types because they aren't marked.

I don't plan to select for anything other than flower colour right now. The F3 should be mostly crimson with occasional whites, and I can rogue out the whites pretty easily because they won't have any antho in the axils. Of course it will are years to eradicate the recessive aallele that causes no-antho white plants, but the recessive cr that makes crimson is already fixed.

I'd like to keep this project as a kind of tall crimson-flowered landrace, with as much variation as I can. There's lots of variation in Telephone in terms of earliness, pod shape/thickness, number of peas in each pod, etc, but they all taste very good and produce well and grow really tall. Telephone x Unity could be like that.

I do want to select for flavour, but I don't want to do that too early. Until the plants stabilise a fair bit, there's no point culling based on taste because who knows what the offspring of each plant is going to be like?

[Galina]

Yes I was and it is quite a chore to mark every flower. But I am speaking from my own clumsyniess, because I find crossing easy and putting the markers around crossed flowers very difficult indeed. Easier of course with fully grown flowers, but still a lot of work. Enjoy your peas!

Yes you are right not to select for flavour too early. We know nothing about how flavour herits down the line and it is so weather dependent. When we had weeks of grey skies recently everything tasted non-sweet. Fortunately that has changed very fast.