Fortunately, it appears that the recent heavy rains did little damage to any of the ripening beans. The Chinese Long Green yardlongs are now ripening en masse, and those that I've opened show mostly good seed. It undoubtedly helped that DW picked all of the wet mature pods just after the rain stopped, and brought them in to dry under a fan.
It's truly delightful that she seems to enjoy seed saving as much as I do.
Picked the first dry pods of Hopi Pole lima, so will be harvesting from now until frost. A few pods of Serbian Pole (
P. vulgaris) and Aeron Purple Star (runner bean) were also beginning to dry. Some of the Fortex that were let go for seed are starting to yellow, so they should begin drying soon.
The bad news... the rain tripped all of my mouse traps, and kept me out of the garden for three days. That was enough time for a vole to slip in unchallenged, and completely strip one of my ripening soybeans.
Fledderjohn was the only large-seeded edamame variety that I grew this year, and they
had been looking good; now there are only piles of empty pods on the ground beneath the plants. There are still two soybeans left that ripen late, both high-yielding grain types... so I''ll place a lot of traps under those proactively. The vole has also begun chewing through any low-hanging pods of Chinese Red Noodle, so I flipped all the lower pods over trellis strings to (hopefully) keep them out of reach.
Voles are persistently the most damaging pest in my gardens, the only thing I can't fence out. They have a special fondness for peas, soybeans, and cowpeas - which they attack just as the seeds begin to dry down. Traps keep them in check if they are kept freshly baited, but a few always seem to get wise. Persistence, and rotating the traps to different baits, usually catches them though.
@Bluejay77 I think I will want to try again next year to grow them out for you with anything I do successfully harvest
