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Wednesday 30 April 2014

Breaking down the plan

This project is going to to take literally years.

I can grow one generation of peas every year (you can squeeze in a second one, but a second sowing may well not be as successful and might waste my precious breeding material).

This year, I plan to do basically two things.

1) Grow out my breeding material, and save as many seeds as possible for next year. For some of the peas I'm growing, I only have 4 or 5 seeds so I'll need to increase their numbers.

2) Make some crosses with the material I have. Hopefully I can perform each cross 5 times. I haven't decided on all the crosses yet, but my plants are only small so far and not even close to flowering, so I have plenty of time to think about it.

Next year I'll grow out and increase some more varieties, as well as the results of my crosses. Those crosses won't start to show me what I'm actually looking for until the year after that, and may require a few more years to get the exact combination I want.

Once I have what I want, it will require seven generations to stabilise it and basically get rid of all the traits I don't want. Like I said, it's going to take a while.

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