2020 Little Easy Bean Network - An Exciting Adventure In Heirloom Beans !

[flowerbug]

@Bluejay77 i packed up most of the beans today to send back.

alas, some just didn't get enough to send back a full amount so i'm sending what i can in the smaller packs and will try again next season for Montville, Pisarecka Zlutoluske and Venda.

i am giving up on Hidatsa Shield Figure. i managed to get enough ok beans to send back what you sent me, but i doubt i will grow them again.

now for the better news. the Brown Lima Beans did very well, i'm sending you back a bunch of those and i have plenty more. my only mistake with them was thinking they were a pole bean and planting them along the fence. haha...

all of the Purple beans you gave me to try my comparison experiment with did well and i'm sending replacements of those back to you. Purple Diamond, Purple Dove, Purple Rain and Purple Rose. of the four Purple Dove is easier to shell and works pretty well for me so i am going to stick with growing just that one. but if you need grow outs of any of these in the future i'll have a supply of seeds here i can plant for you and you wouldn't have to send them to me. as it is right now i have about 25lbs of Purple Dove so those are certainly going to be in stock here for the foreseeable future.

i'll probably be sending the package out next week.

 

[Blue-Jay]

@flowerbug ,

Thanks for all your work. You are great. I'll
make a note about all those purple podded Lobitz beans.

 

[flowerbug]

@flowerbug ,

Thanks for all your work. You are great. I'll
make a note about all those purple podded Lobitz beans.

i keep thinking that if i were great all of these beans would grow for me without any problems like Jack and the Bean Stalk. haha.. yeah, i know it is how it can go at times, but i am kinda bummed that i didn't have better results.

 

[Zeedman]

Don't beat yourself up too badly @flowerbug . 25# of any bean variety is quite an accomplishment. I only got 25% of my normal dry bean yield, if that - and only enough seed of several varieties to replant. Plus total failure of 3 soybeans, one lima, and one runner bean. I seldom have total failures for legumes, so this year was especially frustrating.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Russ's 2020 Bean Show
Day 3
​

Berry's Best - Bush Dry. The bean is pretty I think depending on the growing conditions can be fairly productive or lightly productive. The first time I ever encountered this bean was from John Withee's Wanigan bean collection around 1980. John Withee was from Lynnfield, Massachusetts and had a collection of almost 1,200 beans. John passed away in 1993. I had always thought that John might have acquired this bean from Burt Berrier another bean collector from Colorado hence the name Berry's Best. I have a complete copy of John Withee's bean notes that he used to compile his Wanigan catalog courtesy of the Seed Savers Exchange's librarian. If you would like to read more about the life of this incredible bean collector John Withee go to https://www.seedsavers.org/withee-exhibit-bean-man. For a shorter but interesting read about Burt Berrier go to https://blog.seedsavers.org/blog/burtberrier.

Black Cattle - Bush Dry - A nice bean I acquired from a Professor Juergen Klapprott of Lauter, Germany. He told me it came as an outcross from southern France. It has grown true to type for me every time.


Berry's Best...............................................................Black Cattle


Black Oak Purple - Bush, Dry. This is for now a working title. I picked this out of one of the recently stable Robert Lobitz beans that I had named Black Oak Lake. A rounded oval pure black bean and I noticed some of them looked rather purple. I grew them out last year and they grew true to type and again the same this year.

Black Turkey - Pole Dry. Very productive and produces lots of 4 to 5 inch pods. I had gotten this bean without a name from Mark Christensen of the New Zealand Bean Project in 2011. He told me he found it as an outcross in Turkey Craw. So since this bean was had a lot of black on it I started referring to it as Black Turkey. It produced a white segregation (White Turkey) only one time and this year grew true to type. I did notice on it's first grow out that it produced smooth and wrinkled pods after the pods became dry. This is also a a characteristic of Turkey Craw to produce two different type pods. I saved the beans that came out of the wrinkled and smooth pods seperately and this year grew the smooth podded one. I got all smooth pods.


Black Oak Purple......................................................Black Turkey

Blue Jay - Bush/Snap/Dry. This is my very first outcross I ever discovered in 1977. Named by me for it's color of it's seed when first harvested new. A bean that has gone on to carve out a life of it's own. It wasn't until a few years ago that I found out that customers of one of the Candian seed companies that sold the bean were using it strictly as a dry bean. I had no idea it had a duel use. I tried the bean in soup and a baked bean cassarole and sure enough a productive dry bean also. I grew these beans this year in one of my backyard plots that doesn't seem to grow very good beans so I think these look a little gray this year.


Blue Jay

 

[flowerbug]

@Bluejay77 have you seen Sacre Blue beans? i can send you a few if you don't have them already. unfortunately they did not grow true for me and all the plants were not the solid color version, but i can send a few seeds from those that were.

the ones that did not grow true to solid color have the same pattern as Blue Jay, but are a bit brighter, i can send you a few of those too if you'd like. (what? me enable anyone...? )...

i also have Nonna Agnes Blue which get grey colored beans along with the blue colors, i can also send some of these if you'd like and you don't have them (might as well make the package more interesting ).

and anything else you might have on your mind that i might have... what is your wish list like now for colors/shapes (besides white )?

i do have some speckled white beans (with yellow speckles), but i don't know how stable they are yet. all sorts of other white beans. ...

 

[flowerbug]

in looking at my list of 44 beans planted i had trouble with some beans, but how many would i consider failures?

to me a failure would be partial if i got back some viable seeds but less than what i planted. a complete failure would be if i didn't get any viable seeds back at all. until they're planted again i may not know if certain seeds are viable or not, but going by looks and condition i'd have to guess.

so i think out of the 44 bean varieties/selections/experiments/bulk beans planted only one so far seems to have been a complete failure (Yellow Soldier) - they gave me back a lot of solid yellow beans and other things but not Yellow Soldier. i think this has been the same for every planting i've made from those beans (i don't think i have many left now at all).

and of course to keep things completely stacked up here i have a number of new beans showing up so i'm learning plenty. i'm also suspecting that for some of what i've grown that i'm getting different colors back because of soil conditions and that if these are planted again in different soil i'll get other colors back. that at least is my hypothesis for these. they sure are pretty beans no matter what color they settle on or even if they wander a bit...

 

[Blue-Jay]

@flowerbug,

Thanks for your offer of Sacre Bleu. I grew them this year for the second time. I got my original seed form Lisa Bloodnick of Apalachin, New York who was the person who selected them out of a German bean called Dwarf Blue. My vines didn't even grow as normal as they could because of the place I grew them. Even at that Sacre Bleu was crazy productive and I wound up with over a pound of beautiful seed. Nicely shaped true to color from every single plant.

Wow what am I look for as far as shape, color, pattern. It's really impossible to say. It's one of those things that when you see it......it hits you like a new song you just heard and fell in love with. You should photo all your beans and put them up on this thread. From that I might find something I would like to grow. Maybe and maybe not. You never know. You can send me what you want. Who knows you might just wind up sending me that next new bean song. It also makes this thread more interesting. The more inputs we get makes the passers by to this thread maybe want to stay and join us making this group even more interesting. I wish Trica would put her photos up here too every season.

I had two failures myself this year. Got back less seed than I planted of those two.

So with the amount of beans you grow you must keep eating them so as to not let them crowd you out of your house. With what I grow. I need to keep eating nearly 365 days of the year and keep selling them too. It's my way of spreading them to many people around the world. Future survival of the heirloom beans and the heirlooms that some might become.

 

[flowerbug]

@flowerbug,

Thanks for your offer of Sacre Bleu. I grew them this year for the second time. I got my original seed form Lisa Bloodnick of Apalachin, New York who was the person who selected them out of a German bean called Dwarf Blue. My vines didn't even grow as normal as they could because of the place I grew them. Even at that Sacre Bleu was crazy productive and I wound up with over a pound of beautiful seed. Nicely shaped true to color from every single plant.

Wow what am I look for as far as shape, color, pattern. It's really impossible to say. It's one of those things that when you see it......it hits you like a new song you just heard and fell in love with. You should photo all your beans and put them up on this thread. From that I might find something I would like to grow. Maybe and maybe not. You never know. You can send me what you want. Who knows you might just wind up sending me that next new bean song. It also makes this thread more interesting. The more inputs we get makes the passers by to this thread maybe want to stay and join us making this group even more interesting. I wish Trica would put her photos up here too every season.

I had two failures myself this year. Got back less seed than I planted of those two.

So with the amount of beans you grow you must keep eating them so as to not let them crowd you out of your house. With what I grow. I need to keep eating nearly 365 days of the year and keep selling them too. It's my way of spreading them to many people around the world. Future survival of the heirloom beans and the heirlooms that some might become.

good to hear you are set on Sacre Blue, please save me a few for next year! the color makes them a popular bean.

what about Nonna Agnes?

we do eat a lot of beans, that is why i have bulk beans planted in many gardens and don't have as much room for my experiments that i'd like. we even buy some bulk beans here or there (i don't grow bulk white beans and Mom wants those for some of her cooking and also we cook for other people and i can't supply that many beans).

and yes, the plan is to get back to figuring out the picture taking as soon as i get my sorting done and everything filed back away.

ok, i will send you some other seeds then. Huey for sure. it is stable enough and needs to get out to meet the world.

 

[Michael Lusk]

These are my network beans for 2020. With a small urban yard, I'm really limited but as I mentioned I should have a near full return on the four I was growing.

Verde Temuco - Not very productive, but this could be a site problem not related to the plant. The area ended up having a bit more shade than I calculated.

Warpath - This was the most successful of my network beans for 2020. Decent sized pole plants with good productivity.

Milky Way - Moderately productive, but this could be a site problem not related to the plant as it was the same area mentioned previously that ended up being a bit too much shade. These beans had a really wide range of seed coats; some were super swirly looking while others almost looked like Calypso.

Blue Star Gold - These were massive pole plants but didn't set their pods until practically fall. I didn't get any dry seed pods until the end of October and a lot of them just didn't make it. I finally pulled the plants and hung them in my garage to dry. The mature dry beans are really cool though with tiny white specks.

I'm hopefully going to get these packaged up within a week and shipped to @Bluejay77 along with the Pink Tip seeds. Really looking forward to participating again next year!