'Frictionless', that's a fantastic word to describe those flax seeds. Velcro chickpeas?!
@Pulsegleaner you always have such interesting experience with biodiverse seeds!
To be honest, I have a feeling that that "velcro" trait is considered a BAD one in chickpeas. Just as they stick to a flannel shirt and pick up fibers, they also stick to burlap transport bags and pick up fibers from THOSE, making them almost impossible to clean off for eating. If they weren't
desi types (grinding chickpeas, as opposed to the soak and eat whole kind), I suspect the trait would have been rouged out ages ago.
I first bumped into them back in college, where bags of chickpeas from an Indian grocery near my apartment (Laksmi brand, I think) would have a small amount (maybe between 2-3% of the bag). After that, I would bump into the odd seed now and again, but nothing significant. That is, until I was wandering in my local Indian grocery and found these little mysterious bags of mixed beans in the religious supplies section (the bags bore the name of an agriculture movement in India, so maybe they were the products of farms in that movement). In those, about HALF the chickpeas had the trait (the mothe beans also looked a bit old, having the odd "scribbled" (mottled) seed mixed in) but since at that time so did the big mothe bean bags, I didn't pay it much mind).
Ironically, I now both have a lot of the seed and have nearly none. I have a lot in the sense I never planted the ones I got in that search, nor did I throw them out. I have almost none in the sense that I have no idea WHERE in my room I put the jar of seeds! They're as lost as my first bottle of
Mimosa invisia (giant sensitive plant) seeds, the one that was a pint, and full (when you consider all of them were picked out of rice bean bags, and that a seed is only about as big as a sesame seed, you have some idea of how BAD the field infestation must have been at that time. Now I never see ANY, and the second (must smaller) jar, while full itself, hasn't been opened in at least a decade.)
So the only one I currently KNOW the location of is the few I grew myself as part of my inheritance tests, when I was trying to figure out which seed traits were genetic, and which were quirks of development. Velcro is genetic (unlike "moss" (mottling) which comes and goes at random.) And those are technically different, since they are green velcros (that was the main goal of the tests, to work out if all green chickpeas are simply immature regular ones that are picked early and dried in the shade, or if there are genuine green when mature ones, like there are for peas. Turns out, there are.)
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