flowerbug
Garden Master
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There's been a little bit of talk about it on this thread already, but I'm curious about how you guys all deal with isolating different varieties for seed-saving purposes. Do you have any particular minimum distance you use? What percentage of outcrossing (if any) do you typically see?
I've read everything from "beans don't cross pollinate" (which is clearly false) to "keep at least 50 feet between varieties for seed-saving" (which seems like it would only apply to large-scale seed companies), and I'm curious how you guys have experienced this "in real life" in your smaller-scale home growouts.
i've not been trying to avoid crosses at all, in fact for some plantings i encourage them by alternating plantings next to each other sometimes many times over to see if i can get the crosses i'm aiming for...
whoever says beans don't cross must not have the various kinds of bugs and bees around that we have. i see many different kinds on the bean flowers here.
in less than eight years of growing beans i have more crosses and strange beans than i'll ever be able to grow out and evaluate. i stopped counting at a hundred and fifty. i planted between fifty and a hundred types this season and since many of those were only single beans i probably lost a few dozen of what i planted, but on the other end i've picked up a dozen or two more (including several that i was hoping to finally see) from what i see so far.
mostly what i am doing is for fun, i like the different colors and shapes, i am OCD enough that i love sorting and i'm tactile oriented too so the shelling and sorting fits those parts of my psyche too. i'm probably worse than Ebeneezer Scrooge counting his money v.s. me and the beans. well, not quite as i do like sharing them with other people.
only a few varieties each year grow enough that i eat them. dry beans i want enough pinto, black, red, limas and a few others. i need to grow enough out to see how they taste as a dry bean when cooked up. so i need a few larger plantings for those. i've done a lot of other beans over the years and stopped growing them because i've already tried them and i want to try something else. not because i didn't like them, just because i don't have the space.
for fresh eating i grow a wax bean and a green bean. sometimes i sample other beans as they are growing to see how they taste.
almost every bean is different from the others in taste. i think that's facinating in itself.
i'll have more space for growing beans next year. let the adventures continue...