2018 Little Easy Bean Network - Join Us In Saving Amazing Heirloom Beans

[Blue-Jay]

we need a bean picture!

this is Yed (yellow and red). unique to me because of the splotchy complexion. not seen in any other beans. a new cross to me the past few years.

I think you sent some of these to me and called them Sunset. Do I have that correct?

 

[flowerbug]

I think you sent some of these to me and called them Sunset. Do I have that correct?

half correct unless i messed up my labelling.

i sent both Sunset and Yed.

Sunset is a yellow/orange bean with hints of red around the edges. unfortunately i've never been able to get a decent picture of them to turn out so this is the best i've got to show the comparison...

Yed is a red bean with strange splotchy markings.

 

[flowerbug]

New Bean Mail. ​

UTAH YELLOW EYE: Bush Dry. New bean mail January 17, 2019. I remember
growing this bean back in the early 1980's. As I had recalled it had a little bit larger seed than most other yellow eye beans and a broader solidly filled figure around the eye. Not like the little spot of color on either side of the the eye like Canadian Dot eye, or like the yellow soldier figure like Maine Yellow Eye. I didn't even know if this bean existed anymore. Also I didn't much recall this bean being listed in the SSE yearbook. All I knew was that I had grown it, never recorded my source where I had gotten it from. I also knew I wanted to acquire it again. So I thought I would ask Sara Straate the SSE seed historian if it was in the SSE bean collections and if it would ever be listed by Heritage Farm in the yearbook so growers could obtain it again. She told me it was indeed in the SSE collections but would never be listed in the yearbook by Heritage Farm because they don't have a distribution packet for the variety. Sara told me she talked to their seed bank manager, and he said we have enough seeds in another packet that we could send a sample to you if interested. That was on September 18, 2018. Yes indeed I was interested and they arrived one week ago today. I had also asked Sara if anyone ever listed the bean in the SSE yearbook and who donated the bean to them. So glad the bean wound up in their collections. She told me The seeds we recently sent you - BEAN 1966 Yellow Eye, Utah (accession 102207) - came to SSE in the early 1980s. Our records indicate it came from you. I think only you (1986, 1989) and Ralph Stevenson (1988) ever listed it by name in the Yearbook. So barring germination problems and given a decent season this year. Utah Yellow eye should be available hopefully on my website, and in the SSE yearbook in late 2019.

View attachment 30439UTAH YELLOW EYE - BUSH DRY

stories like this are why we do it... good luck this season with them Russ.

 

[flowerbug]

this pic belongs here too :

 

[flowerbug]

here is the list from the seed swap that i picked up. i'm not sure yet which i'll grow out this season (i don't really have that much fence/pole bean space so not all of these may be grown in large amounts).

- Purple Pod Pole Beans
- (name currently being asked but i should know it eventually
when the person checks their e-mail) pole - a large goats eye bean that is brown/yellow
- Fortex Pole
- Kahnawake Mohawk Pole
- Beefy Resilient Grex - bush/semi-runner
- Monk's Beard Pole
- Anasazi Pole
- Midnight Missoula Bush

comments/experiences welcome.

 

[Michael Lusk]

Was looking through this forum and have a terminology question which I've been unable to answer with a light Google dive. I'm fairly inexperienced with seed collecting and am not familiar with the terms segregation and outcross. Outcross I can kind of imagine but the Segregation stumps me. Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[flowerbug]

Was looking through this forum and have a terminology question which I've been unable to answer with a light Google dive. I'm fairly inexperienced with seed collecting and am not familiar with the terms segregation and outcross. Outcross I can kind of imagine but the Segregation stumps me. Thanks in advance for your help!

to me a segregation is a collection of beans you put aside for specific characteristics. this is a pretty general category for sure because you can use shape, size, color/pattern or even just the condition (an indication of resistance perhaps). when you replant the segregation you are checking to see what happens next so it is an experiment of sorts (pun intended ).

an outcross is when you have cross pollination happening due to the bees or other environmental factors which override the beans natural reproduction of self-pollinating. you often won't know you have an outcross for several years because some characteristics are passed down through the maternal line. so the first season when you harvest the seeds after they've been crossed they may look just like the ones you planted.

the real fun is that you really don't know when someone gives you seeds if they've had crosses happen to them or not.

and then you also get chance mutations, reversions to parental types and also some beans which will keep giving off variations. that's what makes all of this so interesting to me. it's not a sure thing and there is some art to what you select and want to encourage, etc.

for example i'm going through right now the various yellow eye/molasses face selections and out-crosses that i've come up with through the years. i'm not sure yet what my final number of working experiments/selections/out-crosses will be, but probably a few dozen and from those i have to decide what to do next. already i've made up a few containers of give-aways for the next seed swap (for next year!). they contain all the interesting things that i know i won't work with (i don't much like beans with cut ends), but also i picked a few beans from each of the piles i had so there will be a lot of diversity for someone to select from in their own location/circumstances. pretty much something to do to keep me busy for a few more days until i move on to the next batch of sorting.

 

[flowerbug]

i was out yesterday for a bit getting leftover bean stalks off the fence. found a few Munachedda Pale seeds in perfect condition. got a chuckle out of that.

most of the seeds that were left in the pods were in much worse condition so those went into the bucket for being worm fodder.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Was looking through this forum and have a terminology question which I've been unable to answer with a light Google dive. I'm fairly inexperienced with seed collecting and am not familiar with the terms segregation and outcross. Outcross I can kind of imagine but the Segregation stumps me. Thanks in advance for your help!

Think of an outcross as a hybrid. When two different varieties of beans cross genetically, either by natural pollination like a bee or by a human doing it on purpose, you create a new plant genetically. The maternal plant of that cross will produce seeds that look like her regular variety that year, the male part of that cross has no effect on how those seeds develop that year. You cannot tell by looking that those seeds will produce different plants but the genetics of those plants have changed. It will show up if you grow those seeds. Some changes might not be immediately evident but the base genetics have changed.

I don't know how many gene pairs there are on a chromosome strand or even how many chromosome strands beans have. There are a lot of gene pairs involved. Some individual genes are dominant, some are recessive, some may be partially dominant. Some only have an effect if other certain genes are present. When you cross two different varieties of beans that have stabilized these gene pairs get really mixed up. You can get a lot of different combinations from those seeds, what you get depends on how the various genes pair up. This is not just dried beans color and pattern. Thus includes growth habit like bush or pole, flower color, pod color or shape, shape of the dried beans, how productive they are, whether they can be used as snap beans or if the pods are too tough and stringy so they are good only for dried beans, taste and texture of the bean when cooked, who knows how many different variables there can be. It just depends on how those genes randomly go together.

A segregation is one of those possible outcomes. If you plant the seed from an outcross that came from a bush bean and was solid brown, you might get a bush bean that is red and white patterned and very productive, you might get a solid white pole bean that doesn't produce that well, you might get a totally different pattern of black and white. All from the same seeds produced by they outcross. The possible combinations depends on how different the two parent varieties were and how those various genes genes interact.

Another term you did not ask about was stabilized. If you plant these segregations you might get what you planted, same growth habit, flower and pod color, same color/pattern of the dried bean. The way I understand it if you get the same bean after planting it for three generations it is considered stabilized. That means you have lost the genetic diversity that causes subsequent generations to look different. But a lot of times these segregations do not stabilize immediately. There are a lot of genes jumbled together and you can get other segregations after you plant a segregation. You can see that in Russ's bean shows, he plants a segregation and gets many more segregations. Sometimes some segregations never stabilize, they keep producing beans that don't look like what you planted each time.

 

[flowerbug]

...
Another term you did not ask about was stabilized. If you plant these segregations you might get what you planted, same growth habit, flower and pod color, same color/pattern of the dried bean. The way I understand it if you get the same bean after planting it for three generations it is considered stabilized. That means you have lost the genetic diversity that causes subsequent generations to look different. But a lot of times these segregations do not stabilize immediately. There are a lot of genes jumbled together and you can get other segregations after you plant a segregation. You can see that in Russ's bean shows, he plants a segregation and gets many more segregations. Sometimes some segregations never stabilize, they keep producing beans that don't look like what you planted each time.

no matter what each plant is going to have the genetics of the parents, the most common result from beans is self-fertilization so you are getting self-self and after a few generations of self-self the dominants and recessives should be sorted out - but as you say there are some genes which are quite dynamic in what they can influence and you may have certain ones that are showing different patterns - however, i think those types are pretty rare...

so far i have not found any like that among the varieties i've grown. once i get a segregation and grow it out they are stable within a few years. the hard part is that without being able to do full genetic sequencing you can't be sure you have a new cross or variations within a theme unless you are somehow insuring there are no chances for cross pollination. given that bees and other insects can pollinate unless you are growing plants in enclosures i don't think you can ever be 100% sure of what is going on (and even then it's not 100% because you can also have random mutations).