Ridgerunner
Garden Master
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2009
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@Ridgerunner,
Also have you gotten any of your Blue Jay beans to grow as true bush plants? Did you find in those plants and pods to lack a little uniformity?
Oh, the Bluejay saga, a worth story and yet unfinished. First I saved seeds from last year, purposely selecting seeds with a color/pattern I considered true Bluejay and planted those as my early bush beans. They worked great for that. Now that my Blue Lake Pole are producing I've let the Blue Jay go to seed for next year. I have not paid any attention to pod color (I need to do that), but as to everything else they have been pretty uniform. Last year's seeds did have a fair variety in pattern but I put that down to natural differences, with the exception of the solid ones. That's the next paragraph.
When saving seeds last year I noticed some were solid, no pattern at all. I saved those and have three of those growing. All of them are pole beans, not bush at all. The first two are over 12 feet tall, the third was planted later and is staked on a shorter stake but is pretty vigorous. I had a fourth but a rabbit took care of that one. They all have the same color blossoms as the normal Bluejay. None of the pods have dried so I have no idea what the seeds will look like. I tried a pod from one last night as a green bean. It's stringless but the bean is way too fibrous to be a green bean. I was disappointed in that. So far all three seem to be growing very similarly. Time will tell. My code name for them is RBJ (Reverse BlueJay) but I think I'll be coming up with at least one new name for them. The photo below is the pods of RBJ #2. You can sort of see a blurry blossom for general color.
You mentioned in another post that you had a few BlueJay that were sending up runners but the foilage were very sparse. I had one like that in my regular Bluejay. I cut the regular Bluejay back to give it room to grow and staked it. It's extremely slow to do anything but has finally started to get ready to bloom. I don't know what color blossoms it will have or how well it will produce if at all. This is a pretty poor photo of it but it has very little vigor. I'm still hoping to get seeds.