Are there any outcrossing Pea varieties?

[imgrimmer]

To find out I just ordered some accession of wild peas P.sativus syriacus.
Are there any cultivated varieties with a descent outcrossing rate?
I read mean outcrossing rate is supposed to be about 0,07% nearly not existent...

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Peas are all very inbreeding. Part of the problem is that the flower is tightly connected which helps prevent pollen from drying out, but it also prevents pollen from either going out or other pollen being accepted. And that's even if you had a bug that was attracted to such flowers, which i haven't head of any.

However, Joseph once posted some math for beans and their outcrossing rate, and those are also highly inbreeding. Someone had mentioned that beans that have colored flowers sometimes attract bumblebees and other solitary bees that cut through bean flowers to get the pollen, and sometimes help outcrossing beans at the same time. Perhaps something similar could happen in peas. But try getting varieties that have colored flowers.

[blueadzuki]

I think a more accurate way to put that would be "try getting varieties that have colored flowers among the COMMONER pea varieties, or the ones designed to be shelling peas". Pretty much ALL of the really old soup peas have colored flowers, either salmon, red or as for most of the colored skinned ones, pink/purple bicolor. And colored flowers are pretty common among the Asian snow pea strains as well. The catch is that in a lot of cases (though by no means all), those colored flowers and colored seed coats also come with larger amounts of various compounds designed to make the seed safe from predators. Usually not enough to make them dangerous (except maybe in really fully wild stuff) but often enough to make the peas not taste very good when served fresh. Colored seedcoats are also often thick seedcoats another marketing turnoff. In other words, one of the problems with using colored flowers to induce more non-intervened crossing is that those colored flowers often come with traits that make the seed less something you'd want to cross, at least if you are a commercial farmer.

That being said, I always assumed that, back when I had it, my original Triple P line peas were probably the result of a cross. I had started with basically two sorts of peas in that mix (both taken from finds in other things), a very small (about pencil eraser sized) seeded pea with a truly extreme form of chenille/caterpillar expression (so that the resultant peas were actually fully cylinders)and an extremely small (smaller than a bb pellet) pea with round seeds. The seed I got out at the other end had sort of the size of the former, sort of the shape of the latter. A cross is the only way I could explain that (originally I thought that maybe they were pure former with the change in shape due to lower pollination do to fewer plans, but if a plant is self pollinating, plant density should be irrelevant to pollination rate.) I have no idea if this is/was actually proof. For all I know those peas actually WERE wild peas (I assumed the stuff was grown in India, and that that is outside of wild peas native range, but never actually checked) But it might be.