Creating red-podded peas is quite easy. Pretty much any cross between a yellow-podded and a purple-podded pea should do it. But the somewhat more elusive element is the flavour.
These are my Roma peas, which have been a long time in the making. They are a cross between Golden Sweet, a yellow-podded heritage pea which is still available commercially, and Carruthers' Purple Podded, a rare heirloom from Northern Ireland which I obtained from the Heritage Seed Library many years ago (and no longer have).
The original red-podded result from that cross was stunning and a complete surprise, but it also had some flaws. It was a normal shelling-type pea, like its dad. So I got to enjoy the beauty of the pods in the garden but they had to be grown to full maturity and then the peas shelled out (discarding the beautiful pods) and used like normal peas. Except that they were pretty starchy and bland, which kind of defeated the point. I spent many years trying to select slightly sweeter variants from that original line, but to no avail.
It would make much more sense to breed a mangetout or snap pea with red pods, so that you could actually eat the whole pods and enjoy their beauty on the plate instead of chucking them in the compost. I spent some years making crosses of my original red-podder to various yellow mangetouts from my own breeding projects (which were themselves derived from Golden Sweet). But again the results weren't to my liking. They looked lovely, but the pods always had a soapy bitterness to them. This to me is no good. It would make the variety a novelty, and nothing more. Something you might grow in the garden once as a curiosity and then not bother with again because it didn't taste good enough. We've all grown veg that looks stunning in the garden but is meh on the dinnerplate, and that's not a hall of shame I want to add to.
Then, a breakthrough. In 2019 I grew out some purple-podded mangetout peas that were from exactly the same original cross, with the same genetics, but which had evolved in a different direction. These peas, which I named Barcarolle, were very much purple, and they were also very handsome with a lovely sweet and rich flavour. None of the bitter or soapy flavours that afflicted their red-podded cousins. Well, among this particular batch were a few which were not true to the Barcarolle type. They had red pods. This wasn't entirely surprising as they were from the same original cross and there was always the possibility that they had the recessive gene lurking in their genepool which would express red pods in a small minority of offspring. I tasted a couple of sample pods and was thrilled to find that they had a delicious sweet flavour. So my job then was to save as many seeds from them as possible and then grow out a whole batch of them, hoping the gorgeous flavour would persist.
And here they are. Named Roma, after my dearly loved and much missed mum. Once again I'm growing them primarily for seed, so I've only tasted a few samples. But they were absolutely bloody delicious. I still don't want to get too far ahead of myself and declare that I've found the holy grail I've been seeking all this time, but I am now very very optimistic.
You can read about the development of this project in many previous posts on this blog. But for now I'm just going to bombard you with beautiful pictures. I also made a short video in the garden last night, which I hope will help to illustrate how lovely these are. They have been an absolute joy to me all through their creation (yes, even the frustrating bits) and it feels like the best bit is only just beginning.
