How to start a pea landrace

[templeton]

keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) thanks for the offer, but I will decline. Our new 'Borderforce' has the scariest uniforms...Anyway, I have heaps of stuff to go on with, really need to improve my purple snows and yellow snows and trying to stabilise a red snow. No room!
T

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Aug 11, 2017 16:11:25 GMT -5 imgrimmer said:

is this trait available somehow? Could not find the purchase button

Yes, it's free. Both the links i provided are ways to request a sample. I thought i had before, but turns out i requested the wrong one. I may have to try again. You may have better luck requesting from the UK seedstore link.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

gilbert, if you want some crossed up Colorado-grown peas let me know. We will induct you into the pea breeding circle

[gilbert]

Just catching up on this forum. That is an interesting GRIN link, but I think I'll wait on that; I tend to order things and then not find time to do anything with them, and that would be a bad use of GRIN's resources; I'd want my first interaction to be such that I could report back. I'd also guess that a pea from Sweden wouldn't survive here in Colorado at all! I hope somebody else here works on it and gets some heat tolerance into it.

Thanks for the pea seeds Keen! I'll be growing them out. I've come to the conclusion that the standard 'sugar snaps" are just a waste of time here. This spring I planted them in February in a plastic tunnel, which promptly got too hot . . . so I took the cover off . . . and then had to hurry it back on as snow moved in . . . and then off again . . . and still, the result was the same; plants that should have been six feet high were less then four feet high, and the yield was dismal, though it was better then the results of planting in March or April. I even pre-sprouted the seeds to try to get ahead before the hot weather came. And this is in a year when my squash and melons were a flop due to lack of heat!

I've been thinking again about Joseph's comment about the 1:200 outcrossing rate. By starting with a diverse population (the seeds mentioned above) adaption should still proceed, though slower then with an outcrossing plant. And I'd have to do more evaluations and selection to speed things up. How do you all manage to evaluate individual plants? I always find that either things get mixed up, or at least the harvests get all mixed up; I'm never sure which plant produced the most or best, except for such plants as winter squash or dry beans.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Nov 7, 2017 14:07:12 GMT -5 gilbert said:

How do you all manage to evaluate individual plants? I always find that either things get mixed up, or at least the harvests get all mixed up; I'm never sure which plant produced the most or best,

I tend to let peas and beans get all mixed up. If one plant produces 100 seeds, and another plant produces 10. Then when I harvest them all jumbled up, and replant, the more productive plant will tend to predominate among the offspring.

I might tie a ribbon around special peas or beans: for example, in the early years of the red-podded pea project. I can also grow peas on a trellis, and keep the vines growing vertical, so it's easier to tell which seedpod goes to which vine.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Since i live i basically the same climate as you gilbert, though not necessarily the same micro-climate, i would have to agree on the conclusion that snap peas are generally weaklings here and not worth the trouble. The only real snap i liked enough to keep growing and/or was hardy enough to do so was 'Sugar Magnolia' the purple snap bred by Alan Kapuler of Oregon. The worst snap that i ever grew was 'Amish Snap'. Weak. Not a snap, but one variety i want to grow again is 'Canoe'. 12 seeds in a pod. Want to try crossing it with one of the giant snow peas and see what happens.

Good question on the selection and observation. With peas... it's been hard watching individual plants. This year i tried to group them by type and grow them all with their siblings but eventually the mass got so big that they all got jumbled. It was a pain sorting and saving seed. Some of them i just had to sort by seed color at the end, but most of them got sorted fairly well. Some like Purple snaps and purple snows got mixed together in a group called "purples" at the end. Honestly I've only been able to select out truly unique peas if they stand out a lot. One umbellatum or crown pea i had this year had purple pods. That one stood out. One pea plant produced a massive amount of seed from ONE plant and had like 5 "tillers" shooting out from the bottom. That one stood out and i saved seed separate as "heavily-branched". I suspect that one was an F2 from a cross of Mummy White and Salmon-flowered. The only advice i can give is grow them on trellises. I ran out of trellises this year and it was a pain.

p.s. Biskopens is from Sweeden. Don't think it grew very well for me at first. I know it originally failed for Joseph. But by the third year it adapted fairly well for me i'd say. Ironically sometimes the ones that have genes for the most frost tolerance are also the ones that are the most heat tolerant. Biskopens is one of those. I'm curious to hear what you think of it. Feel free to be critical if you'd like, i'm just interested to see how well it grows for someone nearby.

[steve1]

Here's a question that popped into my head regarding the maintenance of landrace peas - particularly snows and snaps. Can anyone that maintains these landraces (Joseph Lofthouse) tell me have you ever encountered full shelling peas in these landraces, as if there is variability in the low parchment gene ie. pV and Pv genotypes the F1 is PV and a full parchment sheller? I guess that 9/16 of the F2 will be low parchment genotypes, but when do you cull the full parchment lines or do you just let them go?

Cheers
Steve

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Because pea crossing only gives a few seeds, I mostly didn't start selecting until the F3 generation. By then, there is sufficient seed to make selection worthwhile. I haven't found decent shelling peas among the offspring of [snow X snap], nor [shelling X soup].

[diane]

Jun 30, 2016 15:05:54 GMT -5 gilbert said:

peas are always a bust for me here in Denver. There are no shoulder seasons, just winter and summer

You are way high in the mountains in Denver, but do you think peas that grow well in the middle of flat Saskatchewan might grow for you?
Wild guess here - I live on the Pacific coast and have never been to either place, but assume that both places experience extreme conditions.

Prairie Garden Seeds in Humboldt Saskatchewan, quite a bit north of eastern Montana, sells a lot of pea seeds, many developed on the prairies.

prseeds.ca/seed_categories/peas/

[gilbert]

You are way high in the mountains in Denver, but do you think peas that grow well in the middle of flat Saskatchewan might grow for you?
Wild guess here - I live on the Pacific coast and have never been to either place, but assume that both places experience extreme conditions.

Prairie Garden Seeds in Humboldt Saskatchewan, quite a bit north of eastern Montana, sells a lot of pea seeds, many developed on the prairies.

You might have a point there; high altitude tends to be rather similar to high latitudes. I wonder if they get snow cover though; we don't get it consistently. 

[steev]

Inconsistent weather is a challenge; the temperature whipsaw of Spring on my farm has cost me numerous newly-planted trees; I don't expect the climate to change, short-term, but I'll be better able to deal with it when I'm more on-site. One must tune in to local conditions and react accordingly, no small challenge in these climatically unsettled times.