2019 Little Easy Bean Network - Come And Reawaken The Thrill Of Discovery

[Blue-Jay]

With bush beans if your pods are yellowing and some are green and swollen with seed. You can pull up plants out of the ground and dry them up off the wet ground if you are getting too much rain. It's the wet soil with the moisture perculating up through the air on sunny days that is destroying your seed. I drive 6' 8" 1 x 2 pole steaks in the ground with long screws (3 to 4 inchers) with one sticking out of each side near the top and part way down the pole. I pull bush plants out of the ground, clip off the root end of the vine and clip off all the leaves with a hand shear, and hang the naked vine with it's pods attached on the screws. Sometimes allowing all the pods to dry for three weeks. Hanging up off the ground the pods will shed water in a rain. Sun and wind will quickly dry them off again.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Have you ever noticed little pods on your plants and when they start yellowing there is no seed in them? Well not all blossoms pollinate. Sometimes enough ovules will pollinate to form only one or two seeds.

 

[flowerbug]

With bush beans if your pods are yellowing and some are green and swollen with seed. You can pull up plants out of the ground and dry them up off the wet ground if you are getting too much rain. It's the wet soil with the moisture perculating up through the air on sunny days that is destroying your seed. I drive 6' 8" 1 x 2 pole steaks in the ground with long screws (3 to 4 inchers) with one sticking out of each side near the top and part way down the pole. I pull bush plants out of the ground, clip off the root end of the vine and clip off all the leaves with a hand shear, and hang the naked vine with it's pods attached on the screws. Sometimes allowing all the pods to dry for three weeks. Hanging up off the ground the pods will shed water in a rain. Sun and wind will quickly dry them off again.

i do at times harvest plants to get them out of a garden as the neighboring plants may be overgrowing them and they are mostly done. this way they will not rot as much. i take all the pods off and shell out those seeds which are mostly ready. the really green and plump pods then may be left in that box top with the seeds as they dry until i get back to it again. if the checking is done about once a week i avoid losing a lot of seeds to rot.

i've mentioned before that we get a lot of foggy evenings. it really is not a good location for growing some things here. once this time of the year comes along we can get a lot of spots on the tomatoes so many of them will start to rot on the plants. by this time we usually have enough put up so it is ok to not have any more. if we can get the larger green tomatoes picked they can finish ripening in the garage. we've sometimes canned tomatoes in November from such leftovers. the flavor and quality isn't perfect, but they are edible - make a chili with them and you won't even notice...

anyways, we had a nice dry spell for about three weeks which let a lot of the early pods finish without any problems at all, but the rains have come back the past few weeks so now i just have to keep on top of what is coming ready to pick as it happens.

 

[flowerbug]

Have you ever noticed little pods on your plants and when they start yellowing there is no seed in them? Well not all blossoms pollinate. Sometimes enough ovules will pollinate to form only one or two seeds.

yes, it is strange to me as the beans are supposed to be self-fertile, but there must be some other mechanism(s) which aborts a pod before it gets going.

to me that is a question i have in comparing peas and beans. it seems to me that peas have much better mechanisms for determining which peas to finish and not starting a pea within a pod, while some bean plants will have a lot of empty pods. i'm wishing i had a good way to do genetic comparisons because some bean plants have less of this problem than others. i'm always curious. it may also be that the temperature is much more forgiving to peas because they are a cool weather crop and they just shut down once it gets too hot. they're smarter? perhaps. or just that is all tied together and those factors can't be broken out by genes.

and then even if some of it is heat related, some of the rest is soil conditions and how well the plant can get it's roots down, but beyond that there must also be genetic things happening which i can only track now by observing the different varieties and out crosses which show up.

gladly i've been finding more beans recently which seem much more resilient and capable of standing up to the heat and more able to cope with our various garden soils.

that's what keeps me interested. to keep working on my goals and projects. having already found some gems it's like a miner looking for a few nuggets to keep the interest and efforts going. that i'm also enjoying a lot of the other aspects along the ways are all bonuses too.

 

[Ridgerunner]

yes, it is strange to me as the beans are supposed to be self-fertile, but there must be some other mechanism(s) which aborts a pod before it gets going.

I'm sure there are several things that can affect it, but even though beans are perfect flowers (Male & Female parts) something still has to move the pollen to where it needs to be. That may be a pollinator picking it up and carrying it, it may be an inset just shaking the flower. It could be the wind or even me when I'm looking for beans.

 

[flowerbug]

I'm sure there are several things that can affect it, but even though beans are perfect flowers (Male & Female parts) something still has to move the pollen to where it needs to be. That may be a pollinator picking it up and carrying it, it may be an inset just shaking the flower. It could be the wind or even me when I'm looking for beans.

i'm pretty sure most of the common beans are fertilized before the flower is fully open. other beans (lima is one i know for sure and perhaps the runner beans, yes, ok, i looked it up) will benefit from pollinator species or hand pollination.

 

[Zeedman]

Have you ever noticed little pods on your plants and when they start yellowing there is no seed in them? Well not all blossoms pollinate. Sometimes enough ovules will pollinate to form only one or two seeds.

It is also possible that the flowers were pollinated, but the plant chose to abort their development. I particularly see that in my pole beans at this point in the season, when growing a seed crop. Once a certain number of pods begin to swell & the plant reaches the maximum number of pods it can support, most of the more immature pods will shrivel & fall off. The magic number varies significantly for many different reasons, but the overall factor seems to be plant vitality. My runner beans - which had been flowering furiously through hot weather, without setting pods - set virtually thousands of pods during the recent cool snap. Most of those new pods have now started to shrivel, as the first pods began to enlarge.

I've experimented in the past with applying fertilizer to beans when flowering ceased. The intent was to trigger the plant back into a vegetative state, so that it would produce new growth & new flowers. The process appears to work, if the plants are not too far gone. I am trying that experiment again this year, with a few runner beans in pots which have ceased flowering... time will tell.

 

[flowerbug]

@Zeedman there is the aspect of determinism going on too. some beans, once they're done they're not going to do anything else. that trait has largely been bred out of some common beans, but others still have it. i'm a fan of that trait on bush beans, i want them to finish and be done after about a month of a good crop. if they are not day length sensitive then they can be stagger planted if i want an extended season of those. it's easier on me to have some garden plots finish earlier so other garden tasks can get done before it gets too cold out.

 

[flowerbug]

after looking at the weather forecast and radar earlier today i decided i had better go out and check to see if any other beans needed picking before more rains came along.

good thing i did. after looking at the PDs i decided enough of them were done or far enough along that i could pick them all and bring them in. so that gave me something to do this afternoon. getting them sorted, shelled or spread out to finish drying was a good project on a rainy day.

two decent sized box tops piled high that should give me a pound or more of beans once shelled and dried. not counting what i already have from the early picking and what we ate fresh these plants were very productive. 87 plants total (seeds planted, i'm not sure how many germinated or survived, but it was pretty close to 100%) and i'm guessing between 50-100 seeds per plant. after last season i was very happy with the amount of return i got from them and this season showed me again they were worth the effort.

i ended up shelling out almost all of them except a few dozen pods left. the shelling was pretty easy for pods that were still somewhat green, but getting limp. for the fleshier pods it wasn't so easy, but i shelled as many as i had patience for because i didn't want to leave them in the pods if i didn't have to (taking up more space here in my room) and this way i can get the pods fed to the worms tomorrow morning. they'll make shorter work of them if they're still a bit green.

it was humid and warmer all day. last night was pea soup foggy. heard something this morning which sounded like a fender bender at the corner but they drove off quickly so perhaps they just ran over the stop sign... again...

 

[Blue-Jay]

@reedy, Got your seed return in the mail yesterday. Again I have to say what beautiful seeds they are. Tkank you for all your work. Did you ever figure out anything about the Red Wolf If it was a semi runner or true bush?

In other news I'm doing what flowerbug has been doing lately. Harvesting leathery pods and shelling them to get them out of those damp pods. Nothing new to me I had to do that on a number of occasions dating back to the late 1970's. We had 5 inches of rain last night combined from two really severe weather events one at 10 pm with super cells imbeded in all the high cloud tops. Then another even more intense storm at 2 am that it rained so hard I thought it was never going to stop. Supposed to be very warm next week also.