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.
Wednesday, 30 April 2014
So why peas?
So why have I chosen to focus my attentions on peas, when I could be working on any other vegetable or fruit? What's so special about them? Why on earth am I planning to spend time cross-breeding them and collecting different varieties?
Well to understand that, you need to know The Plan (which I talked about briefly in my last post). I want pretty vegetables so that people (especially those with small gardens) can grow them in the flower garden where they can look nice but still provide useful and healthy food. Really I had to choose one species because I have neither the time nor the space to work with more. Peas win for the following reasons:
* Peas are already pretty. The flowers are beautiful, just like sweet peas (except they don't smell).
* Peas already have a lot of variety in flower, pod and foliage colour genes, much more than you'd usually see in the standard garden pea which has white (or sometimes purple) flowers, green pods, and green foliage.
* They climb, and come in different heights from maybe 60cm up to 3m, so you can basically pick the height you want. I prefer tall ones, but many people prefer the short ones because supporting the plants is easier.
* They are easy to grow, and well adapted to the coolish environment of my suburban English garden.
* Growing legumes increases the amount of plant-available nitrogen in the soil, improving it for my nitrogen-hungry brassicas which will grow in that space next year.
* Peas and their genes have been studied by geneticists for hundreds of years, which is very helpful when you're trying to work out what genes you're dealing with and how they're going to interact with each other.
* Peas are convenient to breed because they naturally self-pollinate - you don't have to worry about different varieties getting "mixed up" with each other. This is a helpful shortcut for some of the work I'm planning to do.
* It's also relatively easy to make crosses between plants. I'll talk about that when I get to the stage of actually doing it.
* They can be grown very close together, saving me precious space for more varieties. I can squeeze 36 pea plants into a 1' square, the same space needed for one tomato plant or about 1/4 of a squash plant!
* Peas also taste great, and come in 3 basic types - ordinary shelling peas, fat snap peas where you eat the pods too, and flat snow peas where the crunchy pod is the main event. The shoots are also delicious, but I'd rather let the plants grow up into proper plants.
Basically, I love peas. Peas are perfect for my experiments.
The ultimate aim? To create a rainbow mixture of beautiful ornamental peas with varied flower, pod and foliage colours. Peas that are pretty enough for the flower garden, and tasty enough for the vegetable plot. And I'm going to share these with whoever is interested in growing them, because if they make someone else happy, that's payment enough for me.
Well to understand that, you need to know The Plan (which I talked about briefly in my last post). I want pretty vegetables so that people (especially those with small gardens) can grow them in the flower garden where they can look nice but still provide useful and healthy food. Really I had to choose one species because I have neither the time nor the space to work with more. Peas win for the following reasons:
* Peas are already pretty. The flowers are beautiful, just like sweet peas (except they don't smell).
* Peas already have a lot of variety in flower, pod and foliage colour genes, much more than you'd usually see in the standard garden pea which has white (or sometimes purple) flowers, green pods, and green foliage.
* They climb, and come in different heights from maybe 60cm up to 3m, so you can basically pick the height you want. I prefer tall ones, but many people prefer the short ones because supporting the plants is easier.
* They are easy to grow, and well adapted to the coolish environment of my suburban English garden.
* Growing legumes increases the amount of plant-available nitrogen in the soil, improving it for my nitrogen-hungry brassicas which will grow in that space next year.
* Peas and their genes have been studied by geneticists for hundreds of years, which is very helpful when you're trying to work out what genes you're dealing with and how they're going to interact with each other.
* Peas are convenient to breed because they naturally self-pollinate - you don't have to worry about different varieties getting "mixed up" with each other. This is a helpful shortcut for some of the work I'm planning to do.
* It's also relatively easy to make crosses between plants. I'll talk about that when I get to the stage of actually doing it.
* They can be grown very close together, saving me precious space for more varieties. I can squeeze 36 pea plants into a 1' square, the same space needed for one tomato plant or about 1/4 of a squash plant!
* Peas also taste great, and come in 3 basic types - ordinary shelling peas, fat snap peas where you eat the pods too, and flat snow peas where the crunchy pod is the main event. The shoots are also delicious, but I'd rather let the plants grow up into proper plants.
Basically, I love peas. Peas are perfect for my experiments.
The ultimate aim? To create a rainbow mixture of beautiful ornamental peas with varied flower, pod and foliage colours. Peas that are pretty enough for the flower garden, and tasty enough for the vegetable plot. And I'm going to share these with whoever is interested in growing them, because if they make someone else happy, that's payment enough for me.
Why I'm here
I blame my friend for all this. She posted on Facebook about how she was working on her new vegetable garden and what she was planting and what her future gardening plans were.
I thought, "I used to do that. I want to do that again. But right now my raised beds are neglected and full of weeds, and I really don't have the energy to do anything with them." I have fibromyalgia, and there are a lot of things I just don't do any more because I'm in pain or too tired or can't get my brain to function properly.
A few weeks later, an unrelated event provoked a tiny little mini-breakdown. I realised that I hadn't been coping at all well with the restrictions my health puts on me and I feel that the majority of the plans I made for my life are now impossible to go through with. I wanted to do something important and useful and significant with my life and if I wasn't sick I'd be doing that right now - I'm naturally very smart and capable and have an unshakable love for science (my two attempts at studying for a degree were aborted due to illness rather than lack of ability).
I needed some new meaning in my life.
Right. I'll grow vegetables. I used to do this years ago, it's not really hard work and with it I can contribute towards the household finances by cutting our food bills. The Skeldyman can help with the more physical stuff like carting manure, pulling up weeds, carrying things, etc.
The gardening friend spurred something else too. She wants to grow vegetables everywhere but her partner prefers to keep flowers and vegetables in separate areas of the garden. Vegetables aren't pretty, apparently! And this got me thinking: why not breed vegetables that are attractive enough to grow with your flowers, but that give you a useful food harvest too?
And so from that germ of an idea, the Rainbow Pea Project was born.
I thought, "I used to do that. I want to do that again. But right now my raised beds are neglected and full of weeds, and I really don't have the energy to do anything with them." I have fibromyalgia, and there are a lot of things I just don't do any more because I'm in pain or too tired or can't get my brain to function properly.
A few weeks later, an unrelated event provoked a tiny little mini-breakdown. I realised that I hadn't been coping at all well with the restrictions my health puts on me and I feel that the majority of the plans I made for my life are now impossible to go through with. I wanted to do something important and useful and significant with my life and if I wasn't sick I'd be doing that right now - I'm naturally very smart and capable and have an unshakable love for science (my two attempts at studying for a degree were aborted due to illness rather than lack of ability).
I needed some new meaning in my life.
Right. I'll grow vegetables. I used to do this years ago, it's not really hard work and with it I can contribute towards the household finances by cutting our food bills. The Skeldyman can help with the more physical stuff like carting manure, pulling up weeds, carrying things, etc.
The gardening friend spurred something else too. She wants to grow vegetables everywhere but her partner prefers to keep flowers and vegetables in separate areas of the garden. Vegetables aren't pretty, apparently! And this got me thinking: why not breed vegetables that are attractive enough to grow with your flowers, but that give you a useful food harvest too?
And so from that germ of an idea, the Rainbow Pea Project was born.
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