How did your hand crosses from last year turn out, @MichaelFomhar?
I ended up planting out four of my crosses in October and three of them managed to overwinter and are producing F2 seed now. Here’s a cross between Sugar Magnolia snap pea and one of my snow peas. It has some of the purple pod color but with the snow pea pod shape. My other crosses are also showing intermediate traits so I’m confident they were effective. I’ll be planting these F2 seeds ASAP to get an additional generation in this year.
This spring I planted out more seeds from each of these crosses along with four additional hand crosses I didn’t have enough seeds of to risk overwintering, and all of the parent varieties to make additional crosses this year. The variation in growth habit between varieties and crosses is already visible.
I plan to mostly let these F1 crosses self this year in order to collect the more diverse F2 seed, but will be doing some back-crossing to target specific traits from parent varieties. I’ll mostly focus on making new crosses between varieties I missed last year, with a focus on crossing exceptional traits (colors, flavor, productivity, etc) with highly disease resistant varieties from the OSU breeding lines (Oregon Sugar Pod II, Oregon Giant, Cascadia Snap, etc.). Most of these F1 crosses will be snow type pod shapes because that trait is dominant, but I hope to select out snap and shelling pod types again in future years.
I also hope to collect enough F2 & F3 seed to return to the GTS seed mixes so other folks can select from these crosses. If anyone is interested in how to do this yourself, I put together a visual guide last year.
