Today in the garden ... horse fluff

There isn't that much to look at in the garden in early spring, but I thought I would put up a few pictures to give an idea of what's growing on this year.

Wild birds are always a pleasure to have around and I've got two particularly friendly robins who flit around me while I work, gobbling up any wiggly creatures which I inadvertently expose in the soil. I don't put out food specifically for birds because my garden is ramshackle enough to have lots of natural forage for them, and besides, if I encourage them to congregate too much in one place then my cats think I've set it up as a take-away for their benefit. But I do have a couple of these wire frame feeders which have been hanging around unused for years so I've stuffed them with horse fluff. Hey presto, an instant fluff dispenser which nesting birds can help themselves to.

And they really do like it. I have to top it up regularly, which is fine because both my horses are shedding their winter coats. This is horse body hair, not manes and tails. (I did put out some strands of mane but the birds didn't like it as much ... I think it's too long and thick for them to work with.) This stuff is great, because it's very soft but just oily enough to hold together and repel the rain, which is exactly how it functions as weatherproofing for horses. A few bits of hay in there as well for good measure.

Talking of cats, I made a no-dig potato bed and am waiting for the first spuddy shoots to pop up, and my assistant here is keeping them warm to make them sprout quicker.

And here's t'other one, testing out some new yoga positions.

Growing away in the greenhouse border are a few different types of radishes. These are Zlata, a Polish variety with golden yellow skin. The idea is to grab a quick crop of these before I need the greenhouse border for chillies and tomatoes in a few weeks' time.

And here are the chillies, feeling a bit chilly and growing slowly. They will perk up when the weather does. Pretty much all of these were sown around the same time, in early February in a heated propagator on the windowsill. The radically different sizes are variety differences; some of them are even from different species. The large one top left is Zitava, a sweet paprika-type pepper which is supposed to have an exceptional flavour. The small hairy seedlings are Alberto's Locoto, of the less-commonly-grown species Capsicum pubescens. I only wanted one plant of each variety but I had a policy of sowing two seeds because peppers can be precious luvvies with germination. Some germinated both seeds, some only one, so I got a bit more than I wanted but I will try to fit them in.

Finally, osteospermum plants in the greenhouse waiting to be planted out when the weather gets a bit nicer. I can't take any credit for these, I bought them from a local nursery.

Pea breeding projects are go!

What do we have here? 100% germination from 7-year-old pea seeds, that's what!

These are red-podded mangetout peas which represent my best hope of developing a really good, tasty red podded pea. They're a cross between two heritage varieties, Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded. These are an F5, so they're five generations removed from the original cross I made. Most of them are the offspring of one particular plant which was exceptional, but I also sowed a few from a couple of other plants which were also very good. I'm expecting most of them to have red pods, but there may be a few yellows, because of the possibility of a recessive gene lurking in their genepool which switches off anthocyanin production. If I'm really lucky they might not be carrying this gene, in which case they should all be red. But I can already see, even when they're just a few days old, that a few of the seedlings look completely green, while the majority have a red blush on the stem. The absence of a red blush may be an indicator that they can't produce anthocyanin, the pigment responsible for red/purple/pink colours in peas. If the anthocyanin switch-off gene is in there, then I would expect it to show up in roughly a quarter of the plants – a simple Mendelian ratio. We will see – it will become more apparent as the seedlings grow, and it's likely that I'll be able to deduce the pod colour without having to wait for them to produce pods.

This project has been languishing for a few years as I've struggled through my bereavements, but fortunately I'm able to pick it up where I left off. I sowed 56 peas in this tray (two in each cell) and they all popped up within 4 to 6 days, with no duds. The seeds were from a crop I harvested in 2019, and no I didn't have special facilities to conserve them – as is my wont, they were stored in grip-seal baggies in a cat food box on top of a bookcase.

I'm all for challenging myths in gardening, of which there are so many. The books on my shelf (just below the cat food boxes) claim that pea seeds have an expected lifespan of 1-2 years. Older than that and they won't germinate, or if they do then they'll make weak plants. I know from experience that this is nonsense. In a previous iteration of this breeding project I germinated 9-year-old pea seeds without any problems at all and the plants were vigorous and healthy. There are limits, of course. I recently experimented with trying to germinate 18-year-old tomato seeds, and it didn't work, despite my best efforts with a heatpad and some home-made gibberellic acid. But whatever the received wisdom says, there's always hope, and it's always worth a try.

I'm thrilled with 100% germination, and very excited to see how they develop.

Meanwhile, here's some I prepared earlier.

I had 98% germination from this batch, which were also 7 years old and from the same cat food box. These are from my pink-flowered pea project, Alderman x Salmon-Flowered, which is aiming to produce beautiful tall delicious shelling peas, but with two-tone pink flowers instead of the standard white. If you've read previous posts on this blog about my pea projects, you'll know that white flowers in peas are caused by the gene which switches off anthocyanin production. Almost all modern peas have it (and many heritage varieties do too) but if it wasn't there, peas would naturally produce PURPLE flowers, and have purple colouring in the leaf axils, peas and pods. As all my projects are concerned with making lovely colours, I aim always to eliminate the "anthocyanin off" gene, which is recessive, so the little bugger pops up in later generations where you didn't know it was there. 

The pink flowers in this project are (I believe) the result of a modifier gene which deletes one of the pigments responsible for purple flowers, giving them a paler, pinker hue.

The photo above shows them when they were in the greenhouse waiting to be planted out. Note that I DON'T advocate leaving them quite this long. If allowed to grow much bigger than this, they'll start grabbing each other with their tendrils and then it becomes really difficult to disentangle them without damaging them. However, the weather forced my hand on this occasion. I was about to plant them out when I saw that a blustery storm was forecast a few days away, and peas really don't like blustery windy weather. So I decided that leaving them in the greenhouse for a bit longer was the lesser evil. As it turned out, I was still able to plant them out before they reached the nightmare tangly tendril stage.

Here they are in their new home, and I'll be writing another post about the swanky new pea frame which I've set up for them.

20 years of Daughter of the Soil

 

Well, here we are. As astonishing as it seems, I started my Daughter of the Soil blog 20 years ago today.

It hasn’t been a continuous twenty year endeavour – there have been several lengthy gaps. But it served a valuable purpose back then and it still does now, with a fine collection of notes, photos and observations from my plant breeding and heritage vegetable experiments. The internet has changed a lot in 20 years, and I’m conscious that nobody really reads blogs any more – but that’s OK. If I wanted lots of exposure, I could move over to social media and post bite-size bits of gardening fluff for people to doomscroll through. But I find the likes of Farcebook very stressful to engage with, in ways which make it anathema to what I’m trying to achieve; and anyway, my preference has always been for long-form posts where I can go into a lot more detail. Again, the done thing nowadays for such detailed content would be to monetise it by moving it over to Substack or Patreon and putting all the best stuff behind a paywall. But that would go completely against the spirit in which this blog was founded, and I do still live by those values. It was always my intent to create a freely available resource that other gardeners could learn from and take inspiration from. And so I will keep adding stuff here, where it will remain free and open. I’m not selling anything, I’m not sponsored by anyone, and my opinions and experiences are my own.

There has been a long gap since I made my last post, and that’s because the last few years have been grim. From 2019-2022 our family suffered seven major bereavements over four years, including both my parents, to whom I was very close. Then in 2023 it was the turn of the animals: I lost my horse and two of our three cats. I have been absolutely walloped by all of this grief, and have really just been in survival mode. I did very little gardening during this time other than a few chillies and tomatoes. My breeding projects all went on hold, and brambles encroached on the garden. I’ve only just started to come back to it so there is a lot of work to do and it will be done slowly. We have another cat now and another horse. As a consequence of getting into horse ownership I now have an even earthier life as I do farm work every day (seven days a week, in all weathers) which is an absolute joy.

My original spark for starting this blog was a passion and excitement at discovering heritage vegetables, and how they can be so superior to modern commercial varieties. Looking back over the last 20 years at what has changed in the heritage vegetable scene, it has to be admitted that many things have got worse. Heritage varieties were always a niche interest, but back in 2006 you could at least get them if you bothered to search them out. Now, a lot of stuff is no longer availble to buy anywhere. Most of the damage comes from the shoddy Brexit deal which put prohibitively expensive conditions on trade, making seed imports an impossibility for smaller businesses. Most UK seed companies no longer sell seeds to European customers, and European seed companies can’t send seeds to us any more. So everybody’s choices shrink. The problem seems to be most extreme with potatoes, where apparently the majority of heritage varieties were coming to us from the EU, and now they have gone. Shetland Black, Salad Blue, Highland Burgundy Red – even the popular Pink Fir Apple – none of them were available for me to grow this year. I’m having to grow modern varieties, though I did get hold of a red-fleshed one, a German variety called Heiderot, which will be interesting to try. I’ve also been unable to source any seed of Cheltenham Green Top beetroot, an old favourite which I like to grow because I live in Cheltenham, but I don’t have any fresh seed and this variety is another one which seems to have very rapidly vanished.

Another thing which has got manifestly worse in the last 20 years is the climate. I’d been noticing subtle changes in the garden for years, but the weather is now getting very weird, and consistently so. I notice it even more now that I’m doing farm work, as I see the interconnectedness of the plants, land and wildlife and how it has to adjust every day as things go out of kilter. Right at this time of greatest climate peril, we have at least two mainstream political parties pledging to scrap what little climate action we already have, because they’ve realised there are votes to be won in telling people it’s OK to do what they like and not feel guilty about it. There are few morals left in politics nor any sense of anything having value beyond money. It’s all pretty depressing.

However, me and my fertiliser-supplier would like to send a message that no matter what, it’s essential to keep smiling.

There have been many good developments in the last 20 years, it’s not all doom and gloom. Seed saving collectives and forward-thinking gardeners are still doing the good work. New seed companies have come up to replace those that have closed. There is a much stronger awareness among gardeners generally about the benefits of working in harmony with nature rather than trying to subjugate it. This is a major cultural shift which has a vital impact. Like-minded souls such as Charles Dowding are doing an amazing job of bringing holistic gardening ideas to a wider audience.

There is always hope. Things can and will get better. We all have opportunities to make positive things happen, including in very small ways which actually really matter. As individual gardeners we don’t have the means to fix the climate crisis, but the love we put into soil has its way of radiating out. 

As I said in a post way back when, there is a reason I called myself Daughter of the Soil. I went by a principle that if you look after the soil, the plants will take care of themselves. The last 20 years have reinforced that view for me in every way, not least with my accidental discovery that tomatoes yield better and resist disease better if you don’t fertilise them, and all the implications which rippled out from that. There is far more widespread awareness of the soil’s microbiology these days, and the idea of feeding the soil rather than the plants is no longer the niche minority view it used to be. I still believe passionately in the garden as a living ecosystem.

Seed sowing has begun. Chillies and tomatoes are in. Spuds are sitting in egg-boxes making colourful sprouts. The garden is waiting to wake up.

A round-up of 2019's tomatoes

My tomato crop in 2019 did extremely well, with barely a hint of blight. As it's now tomato planting time again, I thought I would do a summary of the dozen or so varieties I grew. The photo above shows one of my own breeding projects, an F2 from a cross of Banana Legs x Green Tiger.

It's been a few months since I posted anything new and I may continue to be sporadic for a while as this has been a very difficult time. We had three significant bereavements in 2019, the most recent being my mum, who died very suddenly two days after Christmas. Although she had a few health issues which were causing us concern, her death was completely unexpected and my brother and I only had an hour and a half's notice that it was imminent – and neither of us lives close enough to be able to get there in that time, so we weren't able to be with her. My mum was a great appreciator of gardens, although she preferred them tidy and full of beautiful flowers rather than the chaotic organic mess which is my domain. I found an old picture of her digging her mother's garden. I don't know when it was taken – most likely in the 1950s. I do however know exactly where it was taken: my grandmother's new (at the time) council house in Tregelles Close, Highbridge, Somerset. My grandmother grew a lot of her own veg, especially potatoes, and my mum would've been helping her to get her new garden into production. If you look closely you'll see there's a railway line running along the back of the garden, which would've been the Burnham and Evercreech branch line, now long gone.

My mother, Roma, digging the garden at Tregelles Close in Highbridge, Somerset.

On to the tomatoes. A few years ago I had a sudden thought that there might be a connection between the conventional methods used for growing tomatoes and the awful problem of blight which afflicts nearly every UK and European crop with grim inevitability. I got this idea because one year I rediscovered an abandoned tomato crop after months of neglect and they were the best tomatoes I'd ever had – unfed, unpruned, and completely healthy and free of blight. Was it just a coincidence? I wanted to find out. So I've continued to grow tomatoes since then using an alternative regime with minimal pruning and feeding, and so far it looks very promising. I haven't lost a single crop to blight since I've been doing this.

It's too soon to say for sure whether the growing method is what's making all the difference, but it certainly has made me question the standard practices of tomato growing. One factor I suspect might be our obsession with 'tidying' tomato plants by hacking bits off them, when it's in their nature to sprawl everywhere. Pruning – and worse, the picking off of leaves to allow the sun to get to the fruit, which is nothing short of plant abuse – causes them stress which can only weaken their resilience to blight. I pinch out a few sideshoots when the plants are young, but largely allow them to grow to their natural shape and size, and this seems to keep them happy and healthy. A much bigger factor though, I think, is the issue of feeding. I'm working on the hypothesis that the lush growth encouraged by regular feeding makes the plants far more susceptible to blight – as well as encouraging the plants to grow bigger than they need to, which in turn leads to more pruning. Whether you prefer a chemically formulated purpose-made tomato feed or go for something organic, the received wisdom is that you MUST feed tomato plants while they're setting fruit, or they won't produce a good crop. I don't believe that this is true. I think that if you provide them with decent soil in the first place, they are more than capable of producing good yields with minimal or no feeding.

In my current growing method, I prepare the greenhouse border at planting time with a bit of seaweed meal and some chicken manure pellets, and give the odd splosh of seaweed extract or nettle tea while the plants are growing, but they get no feed or special treatment while they're producing and ripening fruit. And while I haven't done any scientific trials to see whether the absence of feeding causes a reduction in yield, I can only say that I haven't noticed anything lacking in that department. I'm still getting more tomatoes than I can eat, which is good enough for me.

Clockwise from biggest to smallest: Costoluto Fiorentino, Salt Spring Sunrise, Darby Striped Pink/Yellow, Grushovka, Bloody Butcher, Tomatito de Jalapa.

I intend to continue the same way with my 2020 crop, which is currently on the windowsill in my music studio. And here are a few notes on what I grew in 2019. It's not a complete list, just a small selection. All the tomatoes shown in this post were grown with NO feeding, other than giving them reasonably decent soil to grow in.

Rose de Berne

Origin: A Swiss heritage variety with large dark pink fruits
Type: Vine
My seed source: Real Seeds
Pros: Outstanding flavour, extremely productive
Cons: I had some minor issues with blossom end rot

This variety makes large and vigorous plants which take up a fair bit of space in the greenhouse, and right from the seedling stage they grow faster and bigger than most other varieties. The yields are pretty damned hefty though, so they more than justify the space they take up. They have large flowers which sometimes form weird composite shapes, and the first few usually fall off without setting fruit – this is nothing to worry about. The tomatoes themselves are pretty large, in fact they were the largest fruits of any variety I grew last year. They make slightly flattened globes of the most beautiful rich dark pink colour, with a smooth and silky skin, while the flesh inside is also deep pink, smooth, chunky and jewel-like. The plants need quite a lot of water, and I obviously didn't get the balance quite right in 2019 because the first three fruits suffered blossom-end rot. However, such was the size of the fruits that even the ones with BER were fine after cutting off the brown bit, leaving a substantial chunk of perfectly useable fruit. They're too good to waste. Despite their size, they are relatively early to ripen and they keep going right through the summer.

The flavour is truly magnificent, and has a rich and complex range of flavours within it, beyond the standard tomatoey flavour. It is fantastic cooked, and tastes sublimely lovely if you slice it roughly on top of some pasta and bake it in the oven, where its deep colour, texture and flavour put it in a league of its own. This is one of the few tomatoes which I love so much I want to grow it every year, and it never disappoints.

Gardeners' Ecstasy

Origin: Bred by Tony Haig
Type: Vine, cherry
My seed source: Real Seeds
Pros: Early, huge yields which keep on coming, gorgeous tangy flavour
Cons: Fruits are a little prone to splitting

I've grown this in the greenhouse and outdoors in the garden, and both did well, but the greenhouse one did significantly better. This variety was the earliest of my 2019 tomatoes to start setting fruit and the fastest to ripen. It ripened earlier than all my 'early' varieties, in fact. The plants were completely trouble free with lots of branching, and not too fussy about water. Cherry-sized round fruits were borne in generous trusses, ripening to an orangey-red, and staying productive over a long season. The greenhouse plant was producing new ripe fruit every day all through August and September, and it went on into the autumn. The fruits are very juicy and thin-skinned, which means they are a little bit prone to splitting, but I don't mind that too much. If you harvest them every day then the ones which have split can be eaten before they deteriorate, so that's fine. The flavour is excellent and very tangy. It's definitely down the more acidic end of the spectrum, which is just how I like it, though if you're not a fan of acidic tomatoes then it might not be for you. It is an excellent variety though, and highly recommended – a good all rounder and definitely one of the most productive varieties I grew last year.

Any way up is fine ...

Pink-flowered peas (Alderman x Salmon Flowered)

It was more than a decade ago that I made a cross between Alderman and Salmon Flowered, two heritage peas, with the vague dream of producing a good tasting culinary pea with pink flowers. But as my other three major pea-breeding projects took up more and more of my time, it kind of went by the wayside.

Just to recap: Alderman is a tall, elegant shelling pea with white flowers, introduced in 1891. Its flavour is outstanding, which is probably why it's one of the only Victorian tall peas which is still commonly available today. It's far and away my favourite shelling pea, and while there are a few others which can rival it for flavour when they're young, Alderman stays exquisitely delicious even when the peas are at full size and maturity, and I haven't found anything else that can match it. It has large, well-filled pods on large plants, its only disadvantage (if you consider it a disadvantage) is that it's quite late maturing. Salmon Flowered is a real rarity, whose seed I got from the Heritage Seed Library many years ago. It's an umbellatum-type pea, which means it has a heavily fasciated (thickened) stem with all the flower buds borne in a great clump at the top. The flowers bloom more or less all at once and the pods form in a big clump, sticking out in all directions. There were a few of these varieties around in the 19th century but they're no longer commercially available – and in terms of flavour and yield they can't really compete with modern varieties. But Salmon Flowered (not its real name, which has been lost*) has really beautiful and unusual bicolour pink flowers which I haven't seen in any 'normal' pea at all. The wing petals are a peachy salmon pink and the standard is a very pale blush pink.

*A Swedish heritage pea called Rosakrone is now available from Real Seeds and is very, very similar to Salmon Flowered. I grew some Rosakrone this year to see just how similar it was, and while I'd say it's not absolutely identical, it is similar enough that they're most likely different stocks of the same original variety. The pink flowers are very much the same colour.

So the purpose of hybridising Alderman with Salmon Flowered was to see if I could breed the pink flower trait into a crop of otherwise normal garden peas – using Alderman as the benchmark because of its exceptional flavour.

Back in 2010 I grew out the F1 seeds from my Alderman x Salmon Flowered cross and wrote about it here. The F1 plants all had bicolour purple flowers, which might seem like an absolutely bizarre thing to get from a cross between a white flowered and a pink flowered pea, but actually it's what I'd expected. Purple bicolour is the ancestral default flower colour for peas (not just culinary peas but also the sweet pea Lathyrus odoratus) and the only reason why most garden peas DON'T have purple flowers is that they've all been bred to have a recessive gene which suppresses the production of anthocyanin pigment in the plant. I went into some detail about that in my original post about this cross, so I won't repeat it all here, but suffice to say that Alderman's pure snow white blossoms are not due to any 'white flower' gene as such, they're caused by the presence of this gene which switches off the expression of purple colour so that the flowers are white by default. Salmon Flowered doesn't carry this colour-suppressing gene – it can't do, or it wouldn't have pink flowers – so when you make a cross between a variety which has the pigment-suppressing gene and one which doesn't, the F1 generation will default to the dominant condition – which is for colour to be expressed. Being the dominant ancestral trait, purple flowers prevail. But on a genetic level, the recessive half of the gene pair, which forces the flowers to turn white, is still there and ready to be passed on to a large proportion of the F2 offspring.

I only have a modest sized garden and very limited free time so the focus on my breeding for coloured pods (edible fibreless coloured pods at that) took up more attention and space for the next few years and the Alderman x Salmon Flowered went by the wayside. I had the bag of F2 seed which I produced in 2010, but hadn't sown them. So this 2019 crop was another "back from the dead" miracle story.

I found the F2 seeds in a box, and thought about how nice it would be to work on breeding for flower colour for a change, rather than pesky pod colour. But seeds from 2010 were only fit for the bin, surely? I had to do a quick test though rather than lob them straight out, so they went into a tray of water, alongside some other decrepit sideline projects.

I don't normally soak pea seeds or recommend soaking pea seeds. I was doing it here because it was just a germination test on 9-year-old seeds, and they were not expected to sprout. However, almost all of them did.

This goes against everything I've been taught about pea seeds. 1-2 years is commonly given as a pea seed lifespan. Some people report them lasting a bit longer if you store them in the fridge or the freezer. But mine hadn't had any special storage conditions. They were in plastic bags inside a cat food box on top of my bookcase. The 16 seeds (of quite diverse size and colour, being F2s) in the top right of the photo above became 16 sprightly little plants in a frame in the garden.

I didn't see any loss of vigour from the seed being nine years old. In fact one of the plants turned into the most productive pea I've ever grown, producing large numbers of pods on a multitude of sideshoots. That one will be covered in another blog post later, along with a couple of other interesting things which emerged from this growout.

I labelled the plants individually and numbered them from 1 to 16, and took notes on them as they grew, paying particular attention to the colour and density of the axillary pigmentation (the pinky purple splodges where the leaves join the stem) as I've increasingly noticed a significant correlation between axil splodges and the eventual flower colour and/or pod colour.

Well, I already knew that the F1 had produced purple flowers, so what was I expecting to get from the F2? In a sample size of only 16, I wouldn't expect to get perfect Mendelian ratios for anything, but still there are general trends to look out for. The first would be the colour-suppressing gene discussed above. That should, in theory, turn up as white flowers in about one in four of the F2 plants. In the event, I only had one plant with white flowers (plant no.7), but that's enough to show that the inheritance of that trait is working as expected. In this project, the colour-suppressing gene is not what I want, and I will have to select against it in future years as well, as it will be lurking as a hidden recessive in many of the other plants even though they didn't have white flowers.

Of those which showed coloured flowers, I was expecting a majority to have purple bicolour flowers like the F1, as that's controlled by dominant genes and is the trait most likely to express itself. I know very little about the genetics behind pink flowers in peas, if I'm honest, but I was pretty sure it would be a recessive trait and so I had my fingers crossed that it would turn up in a proportion (maybe one in four) of the non-white plants.

And voilà!

It actually turned up in exactly four plants, numbers 3, 6, 10 and 15, which is close to being a Mendelian ratio. These all produced flowers which were a very consistent shade of pink, that is, they were all bicolour pinks with peachy salmon wings and a pale blush pink standard. There was no variation in the expression of the pink colour, other than some differences in how the colour changed over time as the pigment broke down in the fading flowers, where some turned a more dusky, rosy pink than others. But in terms of the essential flower colour, they were identical to one another and identical to the colour of the parent plant, Salmon Flowered, which provided the pink gene. They did all have somewhat larger flowers than Salmon Flowered – flower size was more consistent with that of Alderman – but that's controlled by a different genetic locus.

They were absolutely beautiful and I was thrilled with them.

A second recessive trait which I was expecting to show up in one in four plants was the umbellatum form – which as far as I know is a simple recessive gene which causes the flowers and pods all to bunch together in a cluster on top of a fattened stem. But having never done breeding work with umbellatum-type peas before, I couldn't be sure how this would work out in practice. Again though, it turned out much as predicted. Only two plants, plants 5 and 9, were of the umbellatum type, which is a bit short of a Mendelian ratio but close enough to show the principle of it. There were no intermediate types, all the plants were either umbellatum or non-umbellatum. As far as this project is concerned, the umbellatum trait is not a desirable one and so I'll be having to select against it until all the hidden recessives are eliminated from future generations. The two plants which had this trait were both purple flowered anyway. It may not be a desired trait in this cross but it does look quite spectacular!

All of the pink-flowered plants had what you might call 'normal' form. They produced two large flowers per node, which gave rise to large green pods, much like Alderman. The umbellatum types did tend towards very slightly smaller pods, whereas all the non-umbellatum types had normal size pods, which suggests that smaller pods are a byproduct of the fasciation trait in umbellatum peas. It may simply be that the plant doesn't have enough energy to produce the flowers and pods all together at the same time without compromising on size a little bit. If there was a genetic cause, i.e. a gene in Salmon Flowered which made its pods smaller (as they ARE quite small) then I would expect that trait to segregate randomly through the F2 plants – but it didn't.

Axillary pigmentation is another interesting one. It occurs in all (in my experience) peas with coloured flowers. A purple-pink splodge at the point where leaf meets stem is invariably seen in a plant with purple bicolour flowers. The purple blotch is made from anthocyanin pigment, so it's subject to the action of the same colour-suppressing gene which causes white flowers. A pea with white flowers will have no pigment in the axils at all, because this gene switches off all production of anthocyanin pigment throughout the whole plant. So in a cross between a white-flowered and a coloured-flowered pea, like this one, the presence or absence of colour in the leaf axils is a very early indicator of whether the plant will eventually have white or coloured flowers. The axil pigment usually shows up quite early in the seedling stage, when they've produced their first couple of sets of true leaves.

In the case of this hybrid, the Salmon Flowered parent variety has an unusual kind of axillary pigmentation. It's lighter than the usual type – in fact it's a dusky rose pink, and very soft and subtle. I was thinking it's probably not a coincidence that a variety with unusual pink flowers also has unusual pink axillary pigmentation – there's probably a meaningful correlation between the two. So I was watching my F2 seedlings to see if there was any sign of this correlation, and there was.

The photo shows the subtle dusky pink pigment in the axil of ASF 06, one of the pink-flowered phenotypes. All the other pink-flowered ones had this as well, while the purple-flowered ones had the more normal blotch of purple colour in the leaf axils, and the white-flowered plant had none at all, as expected.

This is bloody useful, actually. If the colour in the leaf axil is a reliable indicator of flower colour, which it does seem to be, subject to errors of interpretation when the shade is a bit ambiguous, then it means you can identify the flower colour a good month or two before they flower.

Right then, so the appearance of pink flowers in roughly a quarter of the F2 plants suggests a fairly straightforward recessive gene at work. I'm sure there is some info out there somewhere about how this works, but the details of which genes control which traits are often buried in papers in academic journals which I don't readily have access to – and even when I do get hold of them, I struggle to make sense of the scientific jargon and it makes my brain hurt. So in my layperson ignorance I'm going to make a speculative guess about what's happening with this pink flower business.

I think that a pink-flowered pea is essentially a purple-flowered pea which has come under the influence of a modifier gene – probably just a single, recessive modifier gene. I think this modifier gene acts on the chemical makeup of the anthocyanin pigment, suppressing the production of blue pigment while leaving red pigment unaffected, so that the flower comes out pink instead of purple.

There are two reasons why I think that. The first is to do with the axillary pigmentation. If there was a gene specifically coding for pink flowers, I can't see why it would affect the colour of the axils as well. But clearly it does, because pink flowers and pink axils go together. Which suggests a modifier gene having a blanket effect on anthocyanin production throughout the whole plant.

The second reason I think this is the case is because of a study which has been done on sweet peas, which are a different genus from edible peas but have a lot in common with them. As I mentioned earlier, the default ancestral colour for sweet peas is a purple bicolour, but some time in the 18th century a mutation occurred which gave us the lovely pink-and-white bicolour known as Painted Lady, which is still widely available today. A study was published in 2017 in the Canadian Journal of Plant Science on the genetic basis of this mutation, and although I don't have access to the paper itself there was enough information in the abstract to tell me what I needed to know: a single base pair mutation means that the flower is lacking the blue pigment known as delphinidin, which is one of the anthocyanins which make up the purple colour in sweet peas. In the absence of delphinidin, the flower becomes pink. In simple terms, if you imagine that the colour of the purple flower is made from layers of translucent blue and pink, removing the blue layer leaves you with just pink.

So that's what I think is probably happening in Pisum sativum as well. If you look at the pink flowers in my F2 plants, they are all bicolours. They are all essentially the same, there's no variation in the colouring. So it seems quite plausible that they are meant to be the default purple bicolours, and that a recessive gene has come along and deleted the production of delphinidin (or whatever blue pigment they're supposed to have) and this salmon-pink bicolour is the result.

As I said, this is just my speculation! I'm sure there are people out there who know more about it than me.

This is turning into a very long post, but I have learned such a lot from growing these sixteen F2 plants!

So let's finish up with a bit about the pods and peas. This project is not seeking to produce edible pods or coloured pods: both parents are green-podded shelling peas, and all the offspring are green-podded shelling peas as well. My aim was to get the kind of big, plump green pods and fat peas found in Alderman, and not so much of the small pods and small peas of Salmon Flowered. In this, the F2 generation has given me what I wanted, because all the non-umbellatum type plants produced pretty good pods and most had good sized peas.

I did some taste tests as well. I was hoping to get as close as possible to the sweet and complex flavour of Alderman and not so much of the pleasant but rather mealy taste of Salmon Flowered. In this I was also very lucky. I tasted three out of the four pink-flowered phenotypes and they all had very good tasting peas, with ASF 06 being the best. Unfortunately ASF 10, which was a lovely plant with beautiful flowers, died prematurely after getting its main stem damaged in a storm. It had only just begun setting pods at that stage and the peas inside were still very immature. I thought I had nothing to lose by leaving the pods on the plant as long as possible in the hope that they would use the residual energy of the plant to carry on maturing a bit. And they did. When I finally harvested the pods, the peas were still quite small but they look like they might, just might, be mature enough to germinate. I didn't eat any of these – I wanted to conserve as many as I possibly could.

Here are the seeds from the four pink-flowered plants after being harvested and dried. As you can see there are a few differences between them. They all have subtle purple speckles on them, except for the salvaged seeds of ASF 10, which were not fully mature. ASF 15 has more of a green colour to its seeds, while ASF 06 and ASF 15 have a mixture of green and tan. The tan seeds are a trait inherited from Salmon Flowered, which also seems to be related, albeit loosely, to the pink flower trait. You may also notice that ASF 06 in particular has some variation between wrinkled seeds and rounded, dimpled seeds. The wrinkled ones are a rule-of-thumb indication of sweetness in peas, because sugar shrinks more than starch does. I probably won't select out the wrinkled ones next year though, I'll grow a bit of both, but I might possibly separate them out into different halves of the seed tray so that I can keep track of whether there's any correlation between wrinkled seeds and sweeter flavour.

That's it now, until next year when I can grow the F3. I would expect all four of the pink-flowered peas to breed true for the pink colour, as it's a recessive trait and they must be homozygous for that trait. It's likely that some of the purple-flowered phenotypes are heterozygous for pink flowers, and will produce a few of them in their offspring – so I will probably grow out some of the best of those to see if I can get some more pinks. But either way, I'm extremely pleased with what has come out of this F2 crop and I'm feeling quite optimistic about the prospect of getting peas with pink blossoms and lovely flavour, within a couple more years.

Red-podded pea update: the F6 crop and beyond

Ever since I first had a red-podded pea turn up (completely unexpectedly) in a breeding project in 2008, I’ve had a bit of a frustrating time trying to get it into a form which is worth releasing into the world. Not that I’ve been trying continually, because I haven’t been able to maintain the garden every year during the last few years, but it has had me scratching my head trying to come up with a way of producing edible pods with this rich crimson colour. Finally, in 2019, I had a significant breakthrough.

The original red-podded pea plant, numbered GSC 15 in my breeding project, was an F2 from a cross between Golden Sweet and Carruthers’ Purple Podded. The purpose of the cross was to breed a new purple mangetout pea for Ben Gabel at Real Seeds, but neither Ben or I had any idea that crossing a yellow pea with a purple one would result in a red colour. It was only this one plant which produced red pods, and it happened because it was a yellow-podded pea with a solid layer of purple pigment on top. The pigment is translucent, so the yellow shining through from under the purple creates a beautiful glowing red, like stained glass.

This breeding line, which is currently somewhere around an F6 or an F7, is now a stable, true-breeding variety. It’s reliable and consistent for all its traits, except one: it still turns up a small minority of offspring whose pods are not fully red. It doesn’t tend to throw any plain yellows any more, at least not in the growouts I’ve done, but it will produce some semi-red plants which look like the red pigment has just been sprayed around the edge, and some which have a jagged, flamed pattern of solid red on a yellow background. I think these are caused when one or other of the two dominant genes for purple pods is unable to express itself. But WHY it can’t express itself I don’t really know. All I know is that it happens often enough to be a thing, and on that basis I don’t think the semi-reds will cease appearing no matter how many years are spent trying to rogue them out. They just have to be accepted as the nature of the beast, and besides, I had one semi-red this year which I liked enough to want to keep it, if I can persuade it to become a variety in its own right.

One of the semi-red phenotypes. I believe it's probably caused by co-dominance between purple and non-purple genes. Because of that, no amount of 'roguing out' will eradicate these oddities, which show up in a small minority of offspring.

But anyway, having reached the F6 generation this stable red-podded variety still has a problem, and the problem is not going to go away. It doesn’t taste good, either as a shelling pea or a mangetout. It has a gristly layer of fibre inside the pod which makes it unsuitable for eating even when it’s small, and if you shell out the peas to eat fresh they are starchy as hell, with a bitter aftertaste. The genes controlling flavour in peas are complicated, but the situation here is very simple – it is true-breeding for crap flavour.

It does, however, look truly stunning.

It’s possible that it will find a use as a soup pea, maybe becoming edible when it’s dried and then boiled for ages. The jury’s still out on that one. But in its current form it’s not suitable for unleashing on the world, and will have to be considered a breeding line. To that end, I grew out a batch of seeds in 2019 which had been in storage for 4 or 5 years, just to replenish my stock of seed. I saved seeds from the best ones (which was most of them, as it’s certainly a fine-looking variety) and saved the rest for taste-testing in the kitchen, some time when I can be arsed to boil up a vat of pease pudding.

So, what to do? I need red-podded peas with edible pods. And ones which taste nice.

When I did my initial report on the edible-pods frustration nearly ten years ago, I said there were five things I could do about it. Here they are again, with the results of my efforts.

1. Stand in the middle of the garden and shout "BOLLOCKS!" in a really loud voice. Yep, done that.

2. Grow out the remaining F2 seeds (about 20 left) in the hope of finding another red-podded phenotype but with edible pods. This didn’t provide what I was looking for, but I did find an extremely nice purple mangetout (the whole point of the breeding project in the first place) which I selected and re-selected in the F3 and named Barcarolle.

3. Grow out the remaining F1 seeds to get more F2 seed. I tried this, as part of a belt and braces approach. Growing out more of the F1 took a year but it yielded plenty of seed. I grew a batch of F2s in 2019 and some of them were quite nice but no, I didn’t get the tasty-edible-red-podder I wanted.

4. Switch to another line of F3 seed, even though none of them are proper red-podders. This was always a good bet, because some of the necessary traits for red mangetout pods are recessive genes which may be hiding in the DNA of a plant which isn’t showing it. For example, yellow is the base colour for red pods and you can’t get red pods without the recessive ‘golden pod’ gene known as gp. The laws of probability suggest that two out of three of the F3 lines should carry the gp gene, even though they don’t themselves have yellow pods. Also, the two genes which produce edible (fibreless) pods are both recessive, so a goodly proportion of inedble-podded lines could produce edible-podded offspring.

Although only one of my original batch had properly red pods, I did get a couple of peachy-coloured or semi-red mangetout lines. My efforts revolved around these, as they were so “nearly there” – they had sweet-flavoured edible pods and a beautiful fiery blush. But sadly the fully red colour didn’t show up in their offspring either.

But although I didn’t get anywhere with the ‘peachy’ F3 lines, it was another F3 line which gave me my breakthrough in 2019, in a completely unexpected place: my Barcarolle purple mangetouts.

5. Grow more of the original red-podded F2 and cross it with something else. I tried a lot of this as well, but it's the most time-consuming option and I don't have many results yet, so I’ll report on it another time.

Barcarolle purple mangetout

Right then, this is what happened with the breakthrough. Alongside my growout of red-podded peas this year, I planted 16 seeds of my newly developed purple mangetout. Sixteen plants is not very many, but I’m doing all my breeding work on a very small scale in my back garden, so that’s all I have room for.

Barcarolle is a very promising variety which originated from the same cross as the red podders – Golden Sweet x Carruthers’ Purple Podded. I selected an F2 plant a few years ago which had beautiful dark velvety purple pods – a really solid dark purple, which is not something you get all that often in peas. As the peas start to swell inside the pod, they bulge through the pod wall and look like a row of little blackcurrants. The reason this happens is because there’s no fibrous membrane inside the pod, like you’d get with a shelling pea. It takes two recessive genes to get the pod walls completely fibreless like this, and it’s a desirable trait to have because it means the pods are fully edible at all stages of development – they don’t go coarse and gristly. I also got lucky with the flavour, as the pods tasted sweet and juicy and were pretty much stringless. Again, this is an uncommon thing to find in a purple-podded pea, because the purple colour is often associated with a slightly bitter flavour. It’s not that the pigment itself is bitter tasting, but there’s some kind of gene linkage going on which means that the purple pod genes are usually inherited alongside some less-desirable flavour genes. This was by far the best purple podded pea I’d ever tasted so I was well chuffed with this plant.

The following year I grew out the F3 generation, and to my delight, it came almost completely true to type. I had expected a few unwanted recessives to show up, but they didn’t. The F3 plants were as uniformly purple and bobbly and sweet and juicy as the previous year’s plant. I don’t always name my breeding projects at this relatively early stage, but it seemed like it was going to be quick and easy to make it into a stabilised variety so I gave it the name Barcarolle. (In case you’re wondering, I play the piano and I’m a big fan of Chopin.)

So then I grew out this batch of F4 plants in 2019, and, well, to say they began to segregate is an understatement. They segregated like buggery. Fortunately they all had the bobbly edible pods (a recessive feature), but they varied in size, flavour, number of pods per node, and most of all they varied for pod colour. In my batch of 16 plants, I ended up with four different pod colours – purple, green, yellow and red!

My 2019 crop of Barcarolle F4 purple mangetouts, segregating for four different pod colours ... aaargh!

I must admit I don’t quite know why this happened. It doesn’t make sense for a variety which is true-to-type in the F3 to suddenly start segregating like mad in the F4. The most likely explanation, I think, is that I happened to grow out (by chance) only seeds which were heterozygous for pod colour in the F3 generation, so they all showed the dominant purple colour but they still had the recessive genes squirrelled away in their genome. Given that I work with such small sample sizes, this is entirely possible. But anyway, who cares – the thing that matters is that I ended up with no less than four red-podded plants, all of them with lovely juicy edible pods. This is such a holy grail for me, some 13 years after I made the original cross, that I spent an awful lot of time just standing in the garden gawping at it.

The purple pods on the left are what Barcarolle is supposed to look like, but it came out with these red podded variants as well.

In some ways I probably shouldn’t be surprised to be getting red pods segregating out from Barcarolle. The only difference between red pods and purple pods is the base colour of the pod – green for purple-podders and yellow for red-podders. Barcarolle is derived from a yellow-podded parent, so the presence of the recessive gp (golden pod) gene shouldn’t be a surprise. I might have saved myself some grief if I’d tried looking for it here earlier.

As well as being exactly what I’ve been looking for for the last decade, the Barcarolle red-podders have some other advantages over my original red-podded pea. The red colour itself is a bit brighter – more scarlet than crimson. Both colours are equally nice when the pods are young, but one slight flaw in the original variety is that the red tends to darken as the pod matures, until they start to look purple rather than red. The reason for this is not a change in the pigment itself, it’s because of the natural darkening of the base colour of the pod. As yellow pods age, they tend to go more green – a trait seen in the parent variety Golden Sweet – and a greener pod means the pigment appears more purple. In the Barcarolle-derived red-podders, the pods stay yellow right through to maturity, and so the pigment continues to look red for a lot longer. I don’t know what subtle genes are responsible for this difference, but it was consistent across all four of the plants in this batch.

The best of them was the plant known as BRC 16 (above), which was hugely productive. It grew to around 7ft tall and not only produced two pods per node, it also developed fully productive sideshoots – a rare thing in peas – and bore good quality pods on those as well. It also did very well in the looks department, having beautiful colour-changing flowers borne on stems with a lot of bright scarlet colour and pretty pink mottling on the calyx. BRC 14 and BRC 06 were both very similar but not quite as vigorous. The best one for flavour was BRC 11 which had a fantastic juicy raw flavour, like apples! 

I do want to develop a red-podded pea which tastes good raw, because the colour is spoiled by cooking. With any red-podded or purple-podded pea, if you cook it any way other than the lightest steaming, the colour just disappears into the cooking water. No amount of careful breeding is going to resolve this, because it’s in the nature of the pigment itself – anthocyanin, which is water-soluble, and that’s just the way it is. So the only thing a plant breeder can do to get around this is to develop varieties which taste so good raw you won’t need to cook them.

Now, of course, I will have to wait until next year before I can grow out the offspring and see how they look. But I’m very optimistic. And I still have the purple-podded Barcarolle line which, once I’ve stabilised it, will be a wonderful variety in its own right. The red-podded line is not named yet, but I have another year or two to think about it.

The Barcarolle-derived red peas have beautiful bicolour flowers which turn blue as they fade, like these on BRC 16.