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

[flowerbug]

@Zeedman, yes, i've done that, and also picked in the rain when i've seen the forecast continuing for even more rain. it would be a shame to have grown a nice crop of seeds and then lose them to mold.

like you mention, i also cross stack for air flow.

i love it when i can pick up a stack like that of things that fit well together for storage but can be taken out when needed. we had a friend who was a surgical nurse and she had stacks and stacks of plastic trays that i use for drying veggie scraps.

i don't think i was quite awake when i mentioned before that i like lima beans so much because they can be used all ways. as of yet i haven't found a lima that can be eaten fresh. i must have been daydreaming for a moment when writing that...

i sort beans all winter and right up until i start planting i'm sometimes taking second looks and making selections for planting.

a good place to pick up box tops and sorting trays are the big box stores. we've usually got a stack of boxes and box tops around so we can adapt them for whatever project we have going on. the various flats can be used for drying or sorting. while i'm at the big box stores they often give out samples in little plastic cups. i'll save those and i'm not above skimming some of them off the top of the trash cans either. i can never have too many of those when it comes down to shelling and sorting time.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Other things I do when harvesting beans is I have sheets of carboard in an unused bedroom in my house with harvested pods spread out across the cardboard sheet to allow air circulation. I'll have a floor fan or two in the room blowing air over the pods and moving air around the room. Amazing how much moisture constantly moving air can pull out of beans pods in a matter of 10 hours.

My shelled beans will sit all over the house on red styro picknic plates until late November or early December. At that time the beans are very dry and get labled an put into 4 mil ziploc baggies and most seed stored in my freezer.

Click on the Photos to see larger closer up images.

Here is one of my bedrooms with small amounts of pods pods drying on those red styro plates purchased at Walmart.

Here is a photo of my fan setup to dry pods. This was taken before the harvest got really big.

@Michael Lusk might like this photo. This is what my Leslie Tenderpod pods looked like when they are nice and crispy dry and ready to be shelled. I shell them into this old plastic tuperware food keeper container I have so the beans don't roll all over the table. Keeps the shelling process under control.

Here is a 1 x2 furing strip pole I grow pole beans on and this pole also has screws sticking out of it so the bean vines will catch on the screws up and down the length of the pole and won't slither down the pole in a high wind.

If we get a lot of rainy weather and the bush beans are getting pretty dry and mature with lots of yellowed out pods. I'll pull up the bush beans plants to get them off the damp ground and hang them on those screws on the poles to let them dry in the wind and sun. This really saves a lot of seed from spoiling during rainier wet late summers. Photo was taken in my tiny subdivision backyard which I have turned at least half of the lawn into gardening space.

 

[Ridgerunner]

If there is a forecast of rain I'll be out there picking any pods that have started turning to the point that I think I'll get viable seeds. Sometimes those seeds don't reach their full color but genetically they are OK so viable is pretty much what I'm after. It's not just mold I worry about, some seeds sprout in the pod if they get wet. especially bush beans near the ground. That doesn't do much for renewing seeds.

I save coffee cans to sort the beans into, a slip of paper with the code for that bean goes in with them. I made a large frame with 2x4's and window screen to dry large amounts, usually my production beans after they go to seed or my purple hulled peas that have dried too much for "fresh" use. I can pile on a lot and not worry about mold if I elevate them a bit. Then I made that sectioned frame for my high producing network beans or the not quite dried pods.

I don't have the volume some others on here do but this worked for me in Arkansas. I'm not sure what my system will be down here, but I'll have even less space to grow things. With a house dog and young active grandkids drying them in the house is not an option though there are some shelves in the water heater closet. I may need to stick a thermometer in there and see how warm it gets. It should be OK for drying. I just thought of that.

 

[flowerbug]

@bluejay i have beans still on their first set of leaves, been like that for two weeks...

just went out to water and check around. deer found the outside the fence patch and have eaten the tops off a few. luckily nothing important growing there other than bulk beans.

just standing there watering it was getting too hot for me.

almost finished up cooking some lima beans so can go out when they are done and finish watering. you'd think with all the rain we've had i wouldn't need to water, but i just poked some seeds in bare spots they other day so i want to make sure they have some cooling moisture for the hot part of today.

@Ridgerunner you can hang them up in old pillow cases, socks, etc.

i thought it very odd when the first time i saw beans growing from a pod that had been wet too long. before that i thought that perhaps the seeds needed a period of dormancy or even cooler temperatures before they would sprout. this works out well for the breeders though, they send beans to places in the tropics to grow a second and third crop each season.

 

[aftermidnight]

Cafeteria trays I inherited a couple of dozen or so retired trays from where my son worked a few years back, they are useful for many things.

Annette

 

[aftermidnight]

After shelling the next couple of months until perfectly dry my beans go into small baskets I pick up at thrift shops for small change. Then what I don't share or will be growing again the next year go in their own little freezer.

 

[flowerbug]

i can't give a fixed number of collections or groups of beans i have so far but i'm getting a bit of a system going where i have my current projects and some goals in the works, but nothing is set in stone yet because i like doing different things each year.

one collection i started last fall was the ark series, where i'm trying to keep two representative seeds from each variety/selection/cross that i grow (which isn't always possible) and harvest.

another collection is a reference of about an ounce of seeds so i can tell what a variety should look like. this can be refreshed as i grow some out of several of these each year. for beans i don't plan on growing any longer i'm not sure what i will do yet.

then i have selections for planting some of which may not get planted and others which are kinda on-deck just in case i change my mind or have extra spots to poke things in or bare spots (or someone gives me land to plant ) or ...

then i have beans that are still ageing and i'm going to sort them again or decide there's nothing left in them that really interests me so they'll go into the eating beans or into the worm bins.

then i have some groups from past years and different collections based upon source and if i've kept them as unique seed lines or if i've grouped them together. my own pinto beans were sourced from three different sources and since then they've been just put into one container but i've also got about 50 - 100 selections from them from cross breeding or variations within the beans. there's no way i can grow all of these out to evaluate them, so once in a while i just take a few and grow them anyways just to see what happens.

as an example of what can happen... last year i grew some beans and as i was checking them i sampled a fresh bean and it was really really good, but i could not say what plant it came from or what the seeds were like. i hope this year i managed to capture it and replant it so i can try to figure it out. if it was either of the yellow, orange or lavender beans i should have it well covered, but it could have been an outcross and not very many seeds existed. i'm always happy with such mysteries to sort out. i need a few hundred acres...

 

[Michael Lusk]

After shelling the next couple of months until perfectly dry my beans go into small baskets I pick up at thrift shops for small change. Then what I don't share or will be growing again the next year go in their own little freezer.
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@aftermidnight, couldn't help noticing some of my favorite shows in your dvd collection!

 

[aftermidnight]

@aftermidnight, couldn't help noticing some of my favorite shows in your dvd collection!

When I like a show or the series I usually buy the dvd's, Have quite a few.

Annette

 

[HmooseK]

@Zeedman

The Sierra Madre are coming along nicely.