Antipodean red projects

[templeton]

With my purple snows and yellow snows mostly stable, and kilos of seed in the fridge for each, my thoughts turned to my various red projects. To be more precise, i started cleaning up my study so i can work in it, and found various bags of poorly labelled pea seeds, presumably from two of my red podded projects.
One lot podded while i was overseas for a month, and by the time i got round to collecting the seeds, all the pods were dry and faded, so anything with colour got sown into peat plugs, the rest were bulked and mass sown in a thick row. The parents were a dwarf highly disease resitant purple snow, and the other a tall, single flowered huge podded yellow, so introgressing any of these characteristics into the other line would be nice, thus the mass growout.
There's also a hypertendril yellow snow backcross that I'm F3-ing at the moment, but that's another story.
T

[jayb]

Sounds like you have such a lot going on with your red pea projects, fascinating traits being incorporated, Very much looking forward to following progress. Do you have an inkling at what the rate of reds being produced will be?

[Galina]

As you have such a good solid purple, making a good red should be easier. Best of luck with it Templeton. Please photos at every stage.

I have counted the different batches I have reduced myself to this year and it is 34! And ten regular pea varieties too for food and seed renewal. The obsession continues and it is by no means just following up the original features. Half are sowing more F2s. Also following up on accidental features: such as the large mangetout last year that was not interesting in itself (green with purple), but it had that many sideshoots and carried on producing large sweet mangetouts beyond any other (bar the small Sugarbeth snaps which had a good second flush). And of course the three-coloured type.

The snap I bred for OH needs selection (the golden snap feature is fixed but I need to look for large, productive plants), ditto the attractive crescent shape that emerged from the original CEG breeding lines - no idea what generation, only that I grew 'everything else' years ago and saved seeds from yellow pods, which got a bit better evaluated last year. After chatting to Silverleaf about 'wax' I have to pay a bit of attention to the Court Estate Silver, which I had neglected. Not sure the silver colour (waxy surface rather than different colour perhaps?) will be a stable feature, we'll see.

I made a few more crosses a couple of years ago between Amish Snaps and large mangetouts Bijou and Carouby de Maussane, also CEG and Golden Sweet and the larger mangetouts. The rest is following up on red mangetout pods from the crosses with Shiraz and with Purple Podded.

I too find poorly labelled batches and don't know what generation from crosses made in the past, but have been better disciplined with the recent crosses. Not always easy, there is such a lot to write on seed labels and in the gardenbook and on seed packets.

Very interesting to find out more about your hypertendril breeding work. How they get inherited down the line. If hypertendrils are a cross between parsley tendrils and ordinary, will you expect to see all three tendril types in future generations again?

[Silverleaf]

Very exciting stuff! I'm hoping for red pods this year too...