Unity x Mrs Lei

[Galina]

Somewhere I thought we had a topic for this cross, but I can't find it. Admin please sort this post into the right category if we do and I missed it.

Two seeds arrived, very treasured. Two healthy, tall pea plants are growing in the garden here - Unity x Mrs Lei. I really appreciate this seed share, Jayb, I know that this was half your stock of these precious F1 seeds. Please correct if I got it wrong, but I think I am growing the F1 generation from your F1 seeds, not the F2 generation.

I expected the plants to be around 5ft or shorter and early, as both Unity and Mrs Lei are at the shorter end of tall peas. Turns out they grew to 5ft 6 before the first flowers opened. Taller and later than either parent. Hybrid vigour?

Next surprise: I expected the wild type of flowers, the usual two-tone purple and this is not the case either. The standards are near white and the wings are similar, but not quite like the wild type. I have taken photos, but since Windows 10 has arrived (without being invited, I had tried to avoid it), I am currently not familiar with the photo software and it will take me a while to get the photos taken yesterday into usable format.

Mrs Lei is a very nice mangetout pea and a cross with Unity could result in
a) Crimson flowers and delectable mangetout pods
b) a new flower colour. I have forgotten what a cross between b and cr could be
c) Mrs Lei's b is of the palest variant of all the pink peas (colour modifiers?), Elisabeth is darker pink (when it is not displaying whitish or redder variants which can happen and which all revert to normal the next grow-out) and Salmon flowered (a crown pea) is even darker pink. Because of the paleness of Mrs Lei's pink, other colour effects could arise in the flower of any crosses.

Silverleaf and Jayb could you please look this list over and comment.

[Silverleaf]

I think that Salmon Flowered isn't b pink, but that its colour is caused by a completely different locus. I can't remember which it is, but I'll look it up.

I think I saw a similar thing in my Ra x Unity F1 flowers to what you describe - very pale standards which started off white and darkened to a light mauve, and wings that were more of a wine red than maroon (although they had about a day of maroon as the flowers faded bluer). It seems too much of a coincidence that another Unity F1 shows the same thing - almost like the blue pigments are much lower.

b cr is "antique rose", like my Ra x Unity F2 flower.

[Galina]

Thank you Silverleaf - antique rose. Salmon flowered is not b - yes please tell us what you can find out about this colour.

Here is the photo of the Unity x Mrs Lei, these are the first flowers on both plants. It does suggest that Unity's colouring genes do unusual things, glad you have seen a parallel with Unity x Ra, Silverleaf.

[Silverleaf]

I suspect that Salmon Flowered is cm - "coral rose". It looks a different colour to the b plants I've grown, more orangey. The best way to find out would be to cross Salmon Flowered with a known b plant like Elisabeth. Purple in the F1 would mean that it doesn't have b.

[Silverleaf]

That would be good!

[Galina]

White marker string means cross with pollen from Salmon Flowered and the mother is Mrs Lei.

[Silverleaf]

Excellent! Looking forward to hearing what happens in the F1.

[Silverleaf]

Here's what the Ra x Unity F1 flowers looked like.

[Galina]

Hmmm - very similar.

[Silverleaf]

Confirming that another cross, Beacon x Unity, showed a similar thing too in the F1. The first day or so they were almost white in the standard with wine-red wings, but they matured to ordinary wild type colour pretty quickly.

It does seem like there's something about the F1s of Unity crosses where the blue pigment (delphinidin?) takes longer to develop. It'll be interesting to see what happens in subsequent generations.

[Galina]

Today they are looking much more like the usual two-tone purple wild flower. Pods appear to be mangetout, but I haven't been able to check this out - they are green and look similar to Mrs Lei. The plants are very tall, I have to point upwards to photograph them. They have topped 6ft support and I have had to tie in 8ft bean supports.

[Galina]

pods turned out NOT to be mangetout in the end.

[Silverleaf]

Lovely!

[Galina]

A photo of the pods. They look like mangetout!

[Silverleaf]

Ooh, lovely.

[Galina]

The all had Unity type seeds and they all had the black hilum spot in the F2 seed produced from these F1 plants. Wonder whether there will be different seeds emerging next year. There were different seeds in your F3 seeds from the cross with Telephone, although the majority was still of the Unity type.

[Galina]

Segregating nicely in the F2 Generation. I had one plant that barely made 5 inches. I removed the bottle to see what was going on but I am afraid the plant is most likely to perish it is so weak. Most of them are the wild colour - bicolour purple maroon. One plant looks a bit different, more like the F1. This is a nice plant with pink axil spots and an interesting flower colour. Not quite crimson, definitely not pink. Not sure what to make of it. Photo attached. About half the plants are now flowering. A Mrs Lei flower for comparison.

[Silverleaf]

Hmm, that's quite pretty isn't it? Kind of a lighter crimson. Not sure exactly what's happening but it does look pretty close to crimson (but as you say, not quite). Maybe it's just at the extreme light end of the crimson spectrum? And yes, definitely not pink.

Mrs Lei's really very pale isn't it? I didn't realise. Lovely!

[Galina]

Yes Mrs Lei is definitely and consistently a lighter pink than Elisabeth.

[Silverleaf]

I know you can get a really light pink with ar b but Mrs Lei looks somewhere between that and b. Well I guess we'll find out what's going on at some point!

Have you done any other crosses with Mrs Lei and another pink, by any chance? That might give us clues. Or in fact, crosses with anything?

[Galina]

No I haven't made crosses with pink flowers apart from two 'test crosses': when Jayb got some whiteish Elisabeth flowers and I got these redder pink Elisabeth flowers, I crossed Elisabeth and the Redder flowered Elisabeth. This cross showed the usual Elisabeth pink in the F1, ie the Elisabeth pink can be expressed weaker and also stronger coloured. Simply growing out the whiter flowered Elisabeth also restored the usual colours in the next generation. These colour variations are not genetic but environmental.

Since then I have learned that cr in Unity can also weaker or darker expressed.

The second cross I made was Mrs Lei x Salmon Flowered last year and growing out this year. So far no flowers yet but pink double axil rings. All crosses with Elisabeth were made by Jayb.

[Galina]

I have taken pollen from the pale crimson F2 plant and backcrossed it to Mrs Lei. Basically we have a very attractive colour on a vigorous F2 plant. But I don't know yet whether the pods are mangetout or not. Crossing it back to Mrs Lei should bring in more of the right genes to help with those recessive mangetout traits. Jayb's goal for this cross was a crimson flowered mangetout as nice as Mrs Lei. I hope this will help get it there. Should we have it already with the beautifully flowering F2 plant that would be brilliant, but can't be guaranteed. A non-sweet soup shelling pea like Unity is very different from a sweet mangetout.

[Galina]

The pale crimson plant was not mangetout and neither were any of the others in this F2 batch.. Most were wild flower colour shellers with short pods and few seeds.. A few shellers with slightly longer pods but none with as many seeds as Mrs Lei. I had hoped for more, but luck wasn't really on my side with this F2 batch.

For next year I am planning a further grow-out of some of the remaining F2s better spaced - of the seeds from the the pale crimson flowered plant and also the back cross I made of the pale crimson F2 to Mrs Lei.

It was a mistake to plant them too close together. F2 grow-outs need wider spacing and a support stick for each plant to make observation easier, especially with high winds throwing plants off which are then difficult to follow up from their bottles. I tried to have them growing as a 'coralled batch' like I normally do for a single variety as I had a dozen plants and it didn't work very well.

[Silverleaf]

I've grown out F2s and F3s in blocks really close together, I just don't have the room to space them out and I prefer to grow as many plants as possible just to increase my chances of getting what I want.

It means I have to label plants several times as it grows, sometimes labelling every single flower/pod. It's not so bad as I spend most of my time admiring the flowers anyway!

I'm harevesting now and not finding any problems picking out what what I need to save and what should be discarded.

Generally I mark everything I want to keep (e.g. crimson Telephone x Unity plants), and everything that is a "dead end" that will never produce what I want (e.g. white flowers). The rest of the plants are "emergency backups" which will potentially throw up something I want in future (e.g. wild type flowers) - these are labelled by the fact that they don't have labels!

Then again, I'm usually only concentrating on one or two features so it's pretty easy to deal with.