2021 Little Easy Bean Network - Bean Lovers Come Discover Something New !

[Myrthryn]

Grandma Robert’s Purple Pole are doing good, I’ve canned 27 pints. Cassies Purple Pod are just starting to produce, we’ve had a pot of them for several meals. The purple pole from @flowerbug , only a few came up and grass hoppers have stacked! Purple Dove did not get planted. Many things this year did not get planted due to screwy weather. I kept seed back from all the varieties in case of crop failure due to weather. My garden is sparse this year. I only have yellow squash, zucchini, tomatoes that aren’t doing much, and the beans growing in it now. I actually BOUGHT tomatoes yesterday! On a bright note, the Painted Mountain corn did very well although I lost some due to heavy rain when it was drying. I picked it all, shucked it and am letting it dry in the house. Not bean related but at least something was a success! Lol @Zeedman how is yours doing?

We had our granddaughters and their 3 dogs for almost 2 weeks while their parents skipped off to Italy for a much needed vacation. I didn’t get the Grandma Robert’s picked much and was rewarded with a bunch of seedy pods. I picked some for seed, it’s drying and I picked some as shelling fresh beans. Going to can them with green beans, yellow squash, zucchini and those side of the road vegetable stand tomatoes today as soup. LOL

Painted Mountain corn

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Grandma Robert’s Purple Pole Beans

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I shall omit the pictures of ragweed and lambs quarters plus various other bodacious weeds that are having quite the frolic in my beleaguered garden.

Haven't been on in a while. However, having grown painted mountain before, that's an impressive display!

 

[Myrthryn]

Have a bit of a conundrum here. First year doing the network beans, all good it seems with the exception of gardener mistakes. Somehow I planted Aunt Jeans next to Frost. The idea was that Jade Portal was going to be a spacer between them. Few of the Portal came up, and they were only at the end of the row. The inside end of the row, assuming to be Aunt Jeans have all dried and been picked. The middle clump of beans next to them I'm assuming to be all Frost is taking much longer to mature. There's a pretty hard line between what seems to be the two types. Am I correct in the assumption that the late to mature beans are Frost? Can't see much other difference between them. Any input here would be welcome as I'd like to return my 'good' sixty to BlueJay.

 

[flowerbug]

Have a bit of a conundrum here. First year doing the network beans, all good it seems with the exception of gardener mistakes. Somehow I planted Aunt Jeans next to Frost. The idea was that Jade Portal was going to be a spacer between them. Few of the Portal came up, and they were only at the end of the row. The inside end of the row, assuming to be Aunt Jeans have all dried and been picked. The middle clump of beans next to them I'm assuming to be all Frost is taking much longer to mature. There's a pretty hard line between what seems to be the two types. Am I correct in the assumption that the late to mature beans are Frost? Can't see much other difference between them. Any input here would be welcome as I'd like to return my 'good' sixty to BlueJay.

sometimes you have to trace the pods down the vines back to their stalks if they get wrapped together. i try to avoid that problem by only planting very distinct varieties in the same garden.

 

[flowerbug]

it was sometimes discouraging day picking beans yesterday. i know this is how it can go with some varieties when i first try them out and with some of the others too. i get over it. there's enough other successes to keep me interested and the challenges are learning experiences too.

while the plants may have grown and put pods on in many cases the pods were empty or the beans weren't very good quality. those Shelleasy x Soldier beans were so lovely when you sent them to me @Bluejay77 and the plants were twice the size of any of the beans planted around them but i have perhaps a dozen viable seeds from the entire crop of pods that was hanging on them and they sure don't look that nice. i will give them another try next year in a different garden and hope they'll come through. the funny thing is that Venda was planted in the row next to the SES and last year i hardly had any seeds in any of the Venda pods and so i retried this season on them and the pods from those plants did have some seeds in them. so at least i can send some better quality seeds back for those to replace what you sent me. i don't think i have a full 60 beans from those. i'm not done shelling those out yet.

in good news Purple Dove is still productive enough and giving good quality seeds in all the gardens where planted. it is even more reliable than Red Ryder which has been one of my more consistent beans. this year even the Red Ryder beans in some gardens had trouble finishing beans. i'm guessing it was the heat because i did keep everything watered regularly.

the Fort Portal Jade plants are about a foot high and look like they've been through a war, but they are still trying to put on new pods with new flowers. the Monster beans i planted in that same row after the initial planting of FPJ seeds didn't do much were much more productive. Monster is so aptly named. not all the beans planted produced, but a few did and those that did produced quite a nice crop. the problem with many of them is that they resemble many of my other brown marked or spotted beans and i really don't need any more of those to grow out and experiment with. then amidst those plants there will be one plant that puts out such an unusual pattern or color bean so i'll have those to work with going forwards.

i planted Sunset and Yed this year and it looks like Sunset is a good warmer weather bean and the pods can withstand more rain than some other beans. as i'm harvesting and checking beans i pull some pods and check them and while looking at the outside of the pod i'm thinking there's no way the beans in that pod are not going to be rotten, but they are fine. so that is a good trait to have along with the beans being smaller and also finishing up fairly early. Sunset is one of the cross breeds i came up with quite a few years ago now. Yed looks like it will be a later bean, i remember this from the last time i planted it too. not sure how the crop will be from them.

Dapple Gray i was hoping would be a good reliable bean in the heavy soils in some gardens, but again, many pods are not producing beans, just empty or not developed well enough. it mostly depended upon how close those plants were to other sources of shade in the garden for them to be more productive. in other gardens where the soil is better quality Dapple Gray does better. similar to how the many larger varieties of beans react to our soils and climate here. they're all lovely beans, but i have to keep growing them to hope they cross with a smaller more reliable bean and pick up the more resilient traits (which is why i plant so many Purple Dove beans).

this is all very amusing to me too, in the learning department i remembered in past years how the Yellow Eye beans had such a struggle filling pods. this season in most gardens the Yellow Eye beans have been doing good. better than i've had for years. i thought they didn't like the heat, but this year says that thought was wrong.

Huey did very well. it's a winner for a dry bean here.

Lavender did ok, i should have enough beans to return a good portion or full allotment, but some of them may be smaller than what was sent to me.

i still have a lot of beans to pick. i'm not done evaluating all of the beans i planted but on the whole it is a mixed bag. i'm glad that my bulk bean plantings are fairly reliable. i'll get enough back from those plantings to make this worth it in terms of labor, but even if i didn't i'd still enjoy much of the challenge and what i keep learning. i have some wonderful new beans to keep working with that have come from Domino and Monster and i know some of them will be stable enough eventually. already they made it through a very tough season and look to have good form and finish quality and also time, size, shape and habit. these are worth more of my efforts to keep them going. i'll have enough to send some initial samples out.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Have a bit of a conundrum here. First year doing the network beans, all good it seems with the exception of gardener mistakes. Somehow I planted Aunt Jeans next to Frost. The idea was that Jade Portal was going to be a spacer between them. Few of the Portal came up, and they were only at the end of the row. The inside end of the row, assuming to be Aunt Jeans have all dried and been picked. The middle clump of beans next to them I'm assuming to be all Frost is taking much longer to mature. There's a pretty hard line between what seems to be the two types. Am I correct in the assumption that the late to mature beans are Frost? Can't see much other difference between them. Any input here would be welcome as I'd like to return my 'good' sixty to BlueJay.

I didn't answer your email on this subject as I've been extremely busy harvesting pounds upon pounds of dry seed while the weather has been dry here. I haven't seen this kind of great quality seed with this kind of volume in my grow outs for about 7 years. So I will give you my answer here.

It's too bad your planting scheme didn't work out the way you planned. I always suggest to gardeners. Make a diagram of exactly where you planted your varieties. What is in each row you plant. Even note the number seeds planted per variety. Then you know where those look a like varieties are without any doubts. Don't plant look alike varieties close to each other also. Especially with vinning beans. Vines can easily grow into each other and get tangled together. Then you can not be sure which seed belongs to which variety. Based on what has happened this season in your experience I think I will no longer fill network requests of two varieties that are look a likes. They must all be dissimilar enough to easily identify the variety. I've been having trouble getting back enough good seed of Frost bean every year. It's either a crop failure or I send them out to someone and never here back from that grower. It's almost as if the Frost bean has a curse attached to it. It's really weird that it keeps consistenly happening to this variety.

So since it certainly looks like you can not identify with 100% certainty each variety. I would say you will not be able to return Frost. Just keep it and enjoy it as it is for yourself. I will just have to accept this a crop failure. Stuff happens and I can say I am familiar with these types of things happening. Not the first and won't be the last.

 

[Myrthryn]

I didn't answer your email on this subject as I've been extremely busy harvesting pounds upon pounds of dry seed while the weather has been dry here. I haven't seen this kind of great quality seed with this kind of volume in my grow outs for about 7 years. So I will give you my answer here.

It's too bad your planting scheme didn't work out the way you planned. I always suggest to gardeners. Make a diagram of exactly where you planted your varieties. What is in each row you plant. Even note the number seeds planted per variety. Then you know where those look a like varieties are without any doubts. Don't plant look alike varieties close to each other also. Especially with vinning beans. Vines can easily grow into each other and get tangled together. Then you can not be sure which seed belongs to which variety. Based on what has happened this season in your experience I think I will no longer fill network requests of two varieties that are look a likes. They must all be dissimilar enough to easily identify the variety. I've been having trouble getting back enough good seed of Frost bean every year. It's either a crop failure or I send them out to someone and never here back from that grower. It's almost as if the Frost bean has a curse attached to it. It's really weird that it keeps consistenly happening to this variety.

So since it certainly looks like you can not identify with 100% certainty each variety. I would say you will not be able to return Frost. Just keep it and enjoy it as it is for yourself. I will just have to accept this a crop failure. Stuff happens and I can say I am familiar with these types of things happening. Not the first and won't be the last.

Thanks for the reply. Posted in here after the delay on the email. I had hoped that you were busy beyond busy with harvesting. In the back of my mind I wondered if you'd succumbed to some sort of health event. Relieved when I came back on here and saw you were doing well.

I'm not really sure how I managed to do that with Frost, and I do apologize. The beans I've yet to harvest other than from my mishap are Alubias de Tolosa (not yet ready), and Thibodeau (ready but rained all danged day).

I'll be returning extra of the others. Doesn't make up for the mishap. Was hoping to have Frost as a good bean. I did manage to plant a few fava beans as a fall adventure after I realized that they put up to 12x as much nitrogen in the ground. Hope I like them!

Thanks again, Bluejay. Happy harvesting.

 

[flowerbug]

this is a good problem to have. today i will need to get out the large paper bags to start taking pods out of boxtops/flats/etc and get them consolidated to where i have more flats to use again for the initial stage of drying. plus i'll need to get a few bags of bean pods buried in a garden the next few days along with some plants that have been picked over and are ready to become worm food.

last night i also got the edamame soybeans sorted apart from the already dried down soybeans so i could cook some of those up so we can eat them today. it is so much easier to shell those out after they're cooked.

i picked all the adzuki beans and have a small pile of those to shell out. when planting i mixed the commercial adzuki beans in with the others i've grown a few years just to see if i can encourage them to cross. what i found out is that the commercial adzuki beans were more temperamental for the soil quality but the few plants that grew did give me back some larger beans while the others that were from before mostly did sprout and grow but they never get very large seeds. what i hope for eventually is to get the size and temperamentalism traits to average out through time. of course the larger beans are depending a great deal on soil quality to get those larger beans and where i planted them was a notoriusly poor spot so this was all an experiment to see exactly how much a difference that actually did make. i found out that just a difference of a foot and a half of space in that garden along that edge that it made quite a lot of difference so i need to use some worms and worm compost and bury some more organic material along that edge this fall and next spring.

 

[heirloomgal]

@Bluejay77 I'm shelling beans like mad right now, so have not had much chance to take photos yet, but the network Atwater beans are all very purple! This may not be so surprising, I'm not sure, but your website photo looks quite pink to me!?

This is such a fun time of shelling, isn't it? That 'I can't wait to see what's inside' vibe! Especially with all the new beans I'm trying this year!

Also, a sort of exciting bean event unfolded here. While I've now seen a few crosses in my bean grow out this year, those were all crossings originating in others gardens. It's never happened in my own garden. Well, today that changed - I found a Chester bean that was crossed from the last year I grew it. The look isn't super exciting, mostly black with a barely noticeable smattering of white, but I'm kinda thrilled.

 

[flowerbug]

@Bluejay77 I'm shelling beans like mad right now, so have not had much chance to take photos yet, but the network Atwater beans are all very purple! This may not be so surprising, I'm not sure, but your website photo looks quite pink to me!?

This is such a fun time of shelling, isn't it? That 'I can't wait to see what's inside' vibe! Especially with all the new beans I'm trying this year!

Also, a sort of exciting bean event unfolded here. While I've now seen a few crosses in my bean grow out this year, those were all crossings originating in others gardens. It's never happened in my own garden. Well, today that changed - I found a Chester bean that was crossed from the last year I grew it. The look isn't super exciting, mostly black with a barely noticeable smattering of white, but I'm kinda thrilled.

haha! i know. it's fun to see what nature has cooked up. the hard part is finding room and time enough to see what happens next.

 

[Zeedman]

Also, a sort of exciting bean event unfolded here. While I've now seen a few crosses in my bean grow out this year, those were all crossings originating in others gardens. It's never happened in my own garden. Well, today that changed - I found a Chester bean that was crossed from the last year I grew it. The look isn't super exciting, mostly black with a barely noticeable smattering of white, but I'm kinda thrilled.

Unless there are other characteristics besides the color which differ from the norm for Chester, it may just be color reversal. That is fairly common in two-toned beans, I have a few reversals this year in Jembo Polish.