@flowerbug,
Your return seed box came in the mail today. Thank you so much for you work. Thank you too for the Huey bean and the melon. What is that melon like? You got great color out of those Robert Lobitz purple beans this year. You must have found the right place to grow them. Thank you for the abundance of Brown Lima. Is that bean a pole or bush?
glad you got all those babies safe and sound!
[melon digression, skip if you don't want to read about melons
]
i sent so many melon seeds because i have about a quart container full of them and wanted to get some out and around to others who might like them. passing along
@ninnymary 's gift.
they are like a muskmelon, but not one that has had the flavor bred out of them. last year was the first season i grew them here in our hard packed clay and while they had a slow start once they got going they were great, happy and productive. the melons show up dark green and eventually will get some color to them. let them go a bit longer and then start picking. when you cut one open if you smell cotton candy or brown sugar you'll know it's good. you can really smell them in the garden when they are ripening too. they may split a little at the ends, still good. don't let them sit outside too long though after they split because then i was finding ants and wasps liked them as much as i did. we were eating melon every day for weeks and i was having fun learning about when to pick them. the first melon i picked was too early and didn't have much flavor at all. i grew them on the edges of some bean gardens so the vines could sprawl in the pathways and in and over the rocks we have around. they did really well. i think out of six plants we had about 40 melons that we ate and another 10-15 we gave away when i couldn't possibly eat or deal with them all at once.
next year i'm not going to be planting that many plants. three should be ok. the other big thing i liked about them is that they were bee magnets, even if they didn't set fruits right away the bees did get in them. um, sorry, i like to gush about these, they were good melons. and of course since i had such bad luck before with melons i was just tickled to pieces that they actually did anything at all. early enough, productive... at the end of the season the melons are not that great, but if you get some extra sunshine days and the vines aren't dead and the melons don't get frozen i did find out that you could still get edible fruits, not as good as prime but still acceptable food from Momma Nature. i just put a bit of honey and lemon on them to doctor them a bit and we ate them anyways.
[back to bean land
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Purple Dove was grown in decent soil with some organic matter and those will give the better color. the pale white color shows up in the beans in the mineral clay and not much else subsoil we have in some other gardens. i also really selected for color and then i picked some white ones too to make sure i was sending a full representation of those seeds.
the other three RL beans i sent back were grown in better soil so had the better color too.
the Brown Lima beans were bush beans. none of them climbed. i planted them along the fence expecting them to grow up but they never did. productive bean, keep them picked to avoid shatter and rot issues. like the red lima bean the pod splits open when it gets too dry and then that means around here that fog/dew can get in and start rot troubles on the seeds.
thank you again for running the LEBN it's always been fun and i appreciate what you do here.
