Several years ago I crosses a plain old grocery store black eye pea with 'Tetapeche Grey Mottled' cowpea (that I got from Native Seeds/SEARCH about 20 years ago). The first generation hybrids all produced black seeds with a little bit of lighter speckling. As the generations have advanced, other colors and patterns have started showing up. I've been selecting out some of the prettier ones to try to develop into lines. Here's an overview picture of nine of the "lines in the works"...
and close-ups of eight of them.
That one on the far-right I call Eagle Eye because the pattern reminds me of a bird silhouette.
Awesome. I've just started getting interested in beans/peas/etc. It's really nice to see what sort of genetic diversity there is available.
ReplyDelete...diversity available inside commonly available strains, I mean.
DeleteI think it has a lot to do with which ones you choose to cross. This particular cross for reasons unknown to me, produced a very diverse F2. But in contrast, that same 'Tetapeche Grey Mottled' crossed with 'Stick Up' gave basically just the two original parental types in the F2 - boring! Diversity sure is a lot more fun to work with.
ReplyDelete