Pea pod colours

[Galina]

Having written much about purple podded peas and fading or late season effects, here are a few late season pods in the green and yellow spectrum.
From left to right
one Court Estate Gold
two yellow podded siblings of CEG (colour like Goldensweet)
one small green podded Spring Blush (the red speckling has gone on the late pods)
three peas with yellow border and pale green pod colour (again the red speckling is no longer there in these late pods). These were the unusual F3 #1 Shiraz x Court Estate Gold pods with 3 colours . Even though the speckles have gone, the pale green colour is still there. I hope this shade will carry on in further generations.

[jayb]

Quite some colour range. Court Estate Gold really has good deep colour. Again I love the pale 'icy' green of those pale pods. I think it is likely they are a recessive colour and once captures will be back

[Galina]

I really don't understand this 'icy' gene. I have been keeping up for a couple of years with an observation I did years ago that one of the Court Estate Gold plants was paler yellow with an icy sheen, silvery, frosted looking. I called it Court Estate Silver and have been growing it for a couple of seasons. It does come back - sort of! - but not all plants have the icy pale look. There are always a couple in the batch that look like the golden Court Estate Gold. This year too, although there actually was only one plant that was golden this year. I will carry on with this for a few more years and hope that in the end I can get 'silver' as a pod colour by selection.

I understand even less the 'red' or 'purple' colour. Some of my partial red plants from last year started off partially red. Well that was expected. But I am bowled over that this week I am getting fully red pods, no blotches, no partials, they are fully red on the same plant that earlier in the season hat blotchy red pods. Both descendants from Purple Podded and descendants from Shiraz seem to behave in the same way just this week. Pretty weird but delightful to see. What I thought were partially purple pods on Sugarbeth Snap, is also now fully purple, probably only this week but it coincides with the fully red pods. There are a lot of environmental reasons that shape full purple/fully red.

[Silverleaf]

Yes, I've seen a similar effect with my Golden Sweet x Purple Podded F2s - a few of them have partially red/purple pods initially, but later pods have much better coverage or even full coverage in some cases. Some have been very consistent over the season, so I'd guess there is an inherited sensitivity to environmental factors which not all of the plants have.

Pu and Pur are somewhat unstable, so that doesn't help much either!

[Silverleaf]

Interestingly though, Telephone x Purple Podded F2 has had fully-purple pods right from the start. I was expecting a good number of partial purples but everything has either been purple or green.

[Galina]

Same observation with my crosses with Purple Podded. The shelling peas have better colour covering than the mangetout. The instability is more pronounced with mangetouts. I have been growing Sugar Magnolia this year too. Most were purple, but one plant was quite a bit greener and the longer the season went on, the more green the pods got. Don't get me wrong, still about 60% purple, but that is a long way off what the other plants showed. A bit of selection needed - maybe - and maybe the selection won't make any difference.

[Galina]

The peas with the three 'icy greenish yellow' pods on the right on the photo above from last year have been grown again this year and split into a plant with pods with good red covering and other plants with icy yellow, similar to last year. Because I liked it a lot I named this pea. Unfortunately the tri-colour that was so striking in the early pods last year, has not returned. Still an excellent colour on a large mangetout pea, now in the F4 generation.

[Galina]

Well I had some surprises with pea pods this year in the F3 and F4 generations. The tricolour type last year was plain coloured, but split into two types, one very pale green, almost cream coloured and the other type was a pretty good red. Another was marked 'good red' last year, I grew 3 plants of those and none were red, apart from a few pods that had a very light dusting of red. An F4 which I had marked up as 'excellent mangetout' was again really good, lovely pods, but apart from 2 early pods, they were all seedless - a whole plant of seedless mangetout pods. How weird is this? I remembered your words on several occasions, Templeton, that a lot can still shift around in these generations and it certainly does. Now I have taken seeds of all of the peas and we are coming to the end of the season it was time to take stock. There are always surprises, but overall I am delighted with the pea colours. I have intensive yellow, light yellow, icy very light green (cream colour really), icy light green, Green. However no dark green mangetouts. Is this a parallel to how difficult it is to get dark red as mangetout? I had the best red pods but they were shelling peas. One mangetout was good red just one week and blotchy at other times. One of the little Sugarbeth snaps that was blotchy purple last year is a really good, solid purple this year and the Sugar Magnolias were pretty good purple too. Pea colours remains a mystery, what is genetic, what is influenced by the environment?