First flowers

Well like everyone else I've been suffering a lot of slug damage what with the mild winter we had and the wet weather we've been having recently. But my peas are mostly doing well. Sugar Ann here won the race for first to flower. It's a standard widely-available dwarf sugarsnap type with as you can see, white flowers. Nothing terribly exciting, but it's here to provide me with the n allele.

Snap peas are those ones with the edible fat pods. Great raw or in stirfries and they cost an absolute fortune from the supermarkets and they taste much better fresh anyway. All snaps have two copies of n, which makes the pod walls thick. They also have two other alleles which together make the pods free of inedible fibre, p and v.

I'm going to cross Sugar Ann with Golden Sweet in the hope of creating a yellow snap. Golden Sweet's already most of the way there - it has edible snow (mange tout) type pods so all I need to do is introduce n and we're all good.

Only slightly behind flower-wise is one of my experimental lines, W6 15097, which I've nicknamed Absolute Zero. The flowers are described on its page at the Germplasm Resources Information Network as "muddy wild", wild meaning the "default" colour that the flower would normally be in a wild pea plant (maroon/purple). This one looks almost brown.

Apart from the strange flower colour, Absolute Zero's going to give me an allele called dp, which makes the pods a dark blue-green. If I combine this with the gp that gives Golden Sweet its yellow pods, I should get dark yellow pods.

I can't wait to see other flowers! It's also be nice to have some decent weather for crosses...

What I'm growing

I currently have seeds of 42 different types of peas. I don't have the room to grow everything this year, so some decisions had to be made prioritising the material I have.

Peas to eat
Golden Sweet, which I got from The Real Seed Catalogue. It's an old yellow-podded snow pea (i.e. you eat the flat young pods) and it's delicious. It's tall, and had purple flowers.

Purple Podded, which Celia kindly sent to me a few years ago. Like the name says it has purple pods, and it makes a good soup pea. I love the contrast of the purple pods and flowers against the green foliage too.

Telephone, also from The Real Seed Catalogue. Another tall pea, this one an old shelling-type with green pods. This is new to me this year, so I don't know much about it other than the description on the site.

Sugar Ann, a short snap-type pea (like a snow pea in that you eat the pods too, but the pods are thick and fleshy rather than flat). It has green pods and white flowers and is apparently very early for a snap.

Sugar Bon, which I bought because it was extremely cheap from Lidl. I assume it's similar to Sugar Ann but I haven't tried it before.

Peas for seed saving and breeding
 All of the above, plus:

Salmon Flowered, from Galina at Allotments4All. An unusual variety which has fasciated stems (they are thick and ridged as if many stems have fused together and the flowers and pods are all at the top of the plant giving it an "umbrella" effect. They look very interesting and apparently taste nice too. New to me.

Elisabeth, also from Galina. She discovered a single plant of this pea mixed in with something else. It's a pink-flowered snow pea with green pods, which I also haven't grown before.

Waverex, a popular petit pois pea. Short, white flowers, and very sweet tasty peas. Should be good for adding flavour into my project if necessary.

Also some experimental material, which is carrying various genes (mostly for flower colour) that I'd like to add. Most have codes instead of proper names, so I've given them nicknames of characters from my favourite superhero board game to make them easier for me to remember.

Absolute Zero, bluish-green pods.

Bunker, bluish-green pods, darker purple flowers.

Fanatic, pink flowers, some leaf weirdness.

Haka, bluish-violet flowers.

Legacy, cerise flowers.

Ra, pale pink flowers.

Scholar, brick/rose red flowers.

Tachyon, pink flowers, extremely weird leaves.

Tempest, purple pods.

Unity, crimson flowers.

Visionary, blue flowers, dark bluish-green foliage.

Wraith, yellow pods.

That's 20 different types. I must be mad. ;)