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

[flowerbug]

i'm surprised at the quality of the beans in the neighboring soybean field. as we were mowing yesterday i checked one of the pods. the soybeans are not molding at all, clear, yellow seed coats. the plants and pods are completely dry and gray in color. so many rains (with more coming tonight). i don't know why they haven't harvested as the ground should be dry enough by now, but perhaps they will get out there today. these are not soybeans i would use for making soymilk, they're often used as animal feed or oil seed instead.

i checked a few pods yesterday here or there on some plants that haven't completely finished yet, but for the most part there's not too much to pick left, i'll check a few plants today for pods to pick and otherwise we have some harvesting to do this morning and then i'll be getting more of a garden ready for winter.

i've taken a slower pace in shelling and sorting recently as my hand told me it needed a break for a while. i still should be done within the next week or two. sadly. i love this time of the season seeing all the beans coming out of the pods and hoping to find the new crosses and oddities that sometimes can show up. so far in the Purple Dove i'm still not finding any really strange crosses, but i am finding a few with a bit of a stripe or a small marking on it so i always put some of those aside as i'm going along into the replant stockpile.

 

[Boilergardener]

i'm surprised at the quality of the beans in the neighboring soybean field. as we were mowing yesterday i checked one of the pods. the soybeans are not molding at all, clear, yellow seed coats. the plants and pods are completely dry and gray in color. so many rains (with more coming tonight). i don't know why they haven't harvested as the ground should be dry enough by now, but perhaps they will get out there today. these are not soybeans i would use for making soymilk, they're often used as animal feed or oil seed instead.

i checked a few pods yesterday here or there on some plants that haven't completely finished yet, but for the most part there's not too much to pick left, i'll check a few plants today for pods to pick and otherwise we have some harvesting to do this morning and then i'll be getting more of a garden ready for winter.

i've taken a slower pace in shelling and sorting recently as my hand told me it needed a break for a while. i still should be done within the next week or two. sadly. i love this time of the season seeing all the beans coming out of the pods and hoping to find the new crosses and oddities that sometimes can show up. so far in the Purple Dove i'm still not finding any really strange crosses, but i am finding a few with a bit of a stripe or a small marking on it so i always put some of those aside as i'm going along into the replant stockpile.

Busy soybean and corn harvest now for many farmers in the midwest. Ive been hearing excellent yielding soybeans this year in NW Ohio NE Indiana, especially where a few lucky areas recieved late august rains. Last year there was alot of insect damaged soybeans and that is not the case this year. Glad your neighbor has some really nice quality soybeans! A few years ago one farmer in my area had a contract to grow what he called "tofu beans" which were just soybean varieties optimized for human tofu consumption. That ended, and now almost all soybean fields you see are for milling into livestock. feed for Pigs/chickens/beef. There are a few farmers who grow high oleic soybeans which get sold to be crushed into soybean oil, this is becoming more popular ive noticed.

 

[Blue-Jay]

@Artorius,

Your Coon Beans arrived in my mailbox today.

 

[heirloomgal]

Couple more of the higher producers.

Fawcett's Pole - 5 plants

Passage to India - bush bean, not sure how many plants but less than 12

Goose Gullet - bush bean, about 12 plants

Tigre semi runner - about 4 to 5 plants
(sorry! didn't know how to flip it)

Piekny Jas - total beans

 

[Artorius]

@Artorius,

Your Coon Beans arrived in my mailbox today.

View attachment 44602View attachment 44603

Great! Thank you @Bluejay77 again. I'll write you a message on priv.

 

[jbosmith]

It's quiet and I'm not ready for bed yet, so here's a few heirlooms from my corner of the world, all of which are fairly common. The top one is True Cranberry Pole, likely widely grown across Wabanaki and possibly Iroquois lands long before my pasty relatives showed up.

The other is Skunk/Flagg/Chester, named after the animal it shares a color scheme with, a woman who tended it and the town she grew it in in southern Vermont. This bean is often credited as being Iroquois but Steve McComber, Iroquois seed saver, apparently believes that it's an Abenaki variety given that it seems to have spread from Vermont.

Some people have told me that Skunk, Flagg, and Chester are all distinct beans, but I'm skeptical. There's definitely sub-strains of this bean floating around, and it's definitely listed by different names in different places, but I'm not sure the two things have anything to do with each other. I think you're just as likely to find differences in two sources of Skunk as you are between Flagg and Skunk.

Dolloff bean, so named by Leigh Hurley who found it growing in West Burke Vermont and who traced its lineage back to Roy Dolloff, is another Vermont bean that has gained some traction in recent years. I'm not sure anyone knows the history before that but Fred Wiseman, Abenaki seed saver, mentions it in his book, The Seven Sisters. It shares a lima-esque shape with Skunk and I've often wondered if they're distant cousins. These seeds came from a local gardener by way of a commercial source. It's very similar, but not identical to, the beans that Leigh gave me years ago. I'm beginning to wonder if having sub-strains is the bean equivalent to having made it in the world

In other news, I just spilled those Skunk beans and now see a bean weevil crawling across the floor. I guess those are headed to the freezer...

 

[Zeedman]

Nice looking beans, @jbosmith . If the cranberry beans are the same as True Red Cranberry, I'm a little surprised those made it in your short season.

 

[jbosmith]

Nice looking beans, @jbosmith . If the cranberry beans are the same as True Red Cranberry, I'm a little surprised those made it in your short season.

I have a secret to growing late season beans - I grow them in a community garden. Aphids, mexican bean beetles, japanese beetles, and bean weevils all gang up on them, all the leaves disappear in mid-august, and everything ripens all at once. That's why a lot of the seeds are a tad wrinkly.

 

[jbosmith]

There are actually a lot of heirloom pole beans from this area that I find challenging to ripen in my cold gardens. Even Dolloff will be mostly shellies most years there, and it's close to the climate where it had been grown for generations. I'd love to go back a few centuries and see how the natives did it. My suspicion is that the dry beans were harvested first, as they started ripening near the bottoms of the vines, and then a lot of shellies were eaten fresh.

 

[Artorius]

It's quiet and I'm not ready for bed yet, so here's a few heirlooms from my corner of the world, all of which are fairly common. The top one is True Cranberry Pole, likely widely grown across Wabanaki and possibly Iroquois lands long before my pasty relatives showed up.

@jbosmith
Do you have a photo of this bean pod? I have grown True Red Cranberry this year and one plant has fairly wide pods compared to the others but the seeds are the same.