Post by templeton on Oct 24, 2014 21:02:08 GMT -5
Not so much a tutorial, as a handy hint. I've been growing out some of my purple snow pea breeding lines. My strategy is to collect plant-to-bag, with my limited space I need to be strategic in my growouts, no scattergun mass selection here!
Pea plants are very undisciplined, even when given room. And to collect seed plant-to-bag is a tiresome exercise, when the hulms are all tangled (up in purple, in this case
)and brittle, and have fallen all over each other. As I try to trace each branching plant through the tangle, bits drop off, and if you break a bit, it can be very difficult to find which stem it broke from. Struggling with the task this morning, I spied the clothes line, covered in brightly coloured plastic clothes pegs...
So collect a pile of same coloured pegs, clip 'em to your shirt pocket flap so they are handy, and trace the hulms through the thicket, tagging with the same colour peg each of the branches of a single plant. Makes it much easier to keep separate the pods from each individual plant.
T
Pea plants are very undisciplined, even when given room. And to collect seed plant-to-bag is a tiresome exercise, when the hulms are all tangled (up in purple, in this case
)and brittle, and have fallen all over each other. As I try to trace each branching plant through the tangle, bits drop off, and if you break a bit, it can be very difficult to find which stem it broke from. Struggling with the task this morning, I spied the clothes line, covered in brightly coloured plastic clothes pegs...So collect a pile of same coloured pegs, clip 'em to your shirt pocket flap so they are handy, and trace the hulms through the thicket, tagging with the same colour peg each of the branches of a single plant. Makes it much easier to keep separate the pods from each individual plant.
T