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

[flowerbug]

i may have found my first mutation/out-cross in Purple Dove. a single seed with some variation in the seed coat.

guess what color?

...

...

...

...

brown. lol

i have seeds with various markings set aside too so when i get around to it i'll post a picture. sometimes a seed coat can change colors due to fermentation or may not repeat so it will be interesting to see if anything comes of this but it will be probably the one bean i grow in a pot next spring. i hate it when i only have a single seed of some kind like this...

 

[flowerbug]

Cowpeas like heat. They are mostly grown in the southern U.S., where they tolerate much more heat than those of us in the North experience. Neither of us is likely to ever see cowpeas heat-stressed. They don't like cool temperatures though - especially cold winds or cool nights. Temps below 50 F. will stunt them, but if pods have already set, the plants may just abort flowers & young pods, to mature the older pods.

The hyacinth bean I grow is a white-flowered bush variety that is not daylength sensitive- unlike most hyacinth beans. It blooms just over 30 days after planting. This variety was bred for the flattened immature pods, which look like somewhat bumpy, bean-flavored snow peas. That is the only hyacinth bean I grow now, since it seeds easily here. All of the pole varieties I tried were daylength sensitive, and bloomed too late for my short summer. There is another day-neutral hyacinth bean that was bred for edible seeds, but I haven't grown it (yet).
View attachment 45036

wow, i didn't even know there were any bush hyacynth beans, what color are the seeds?

and what are the pods like to eat? i'd like something that can tolerate the heat and wet spells in our clay. do chipmunks like them? rabbits? groundhogs? ... eer-d?

 

[flowerbug]

From the Wiki:

Mine died out when the heat set in, along with the garbanzos, which prefer similar temps. The grass peas were just a trial, so no big deal... but I really wish I could grow garbanzos reliably. I have a large-seeded, chestnut-red variety that I really want to grow in quantity.

if you ever get enough to grow i'll certainly be interested. chick peas are always on my list for growing but i've not found ones that will do ok here. no hurry tho... haha...

 

[Pulsegleaner]

wow, i didn't even know there were any bush hyacynth beans, what color are the seeds?

and what are the pods like to eat? i'd like something that can tolerate the heat and wet spells in our clay. do chipmunks like them? rabbits? groundhogs? ... eer-d?

Tannish brown, according to the sample I got from @Zeedman

And Deer LOVE hyacinth beans. In fact, in the south, a lot of people grow them in grazing plots to attract deer for hunting.

 

[Zeedman]

ETA: I'd also like to be able to grow garbanzos. I was going to try Black Kabouli next year

if you ever get enough to grow i'll certainly be interested. chick peas are always on my list for growing but i've not found ones that will do ok here. no hurry tho... haha...

Garbanzos (or at least the two I've grown) can be challenging. They don't like summer heat, and my Spring is too short. Planting them in locations that get afternoon shade seems to help... wish I had done that this year. The pods also have very little moisture resistance, so rains during ripening will cause heavy losses due to rot and/or sprouting. This year, heat did them in - but I did get enough seed for another try. Most years, the plants survive, but late summer rains destroy most of the seed.

And if by chance I do get a good year, mice will probably harvest the seed before I do. The low plants make easy pickings.

The two garbanzos I have are uncommon & worth growing elsewhere; so while I may never get a good harvest myself, my goal is to just grow enough seed to share with gardeners in more hospitable climates.

 

[jbosmith]

Garbanzos (or at least the two I've grown) can be challenging. They don't like summer heat, and my Spring is too short. Planting them in locations that get afternoon shade seems to help... wish I had done that this year. The pods also have very little moisture resistance, so rains during ripening will cause heavy losses due to rot and/or sprouting. This year, heat did them in - but I did get enough seed for another try. Most years, the plants survive, but late summer rains destroy most of the seed.

And if by chance I do get a good year, mice will probably harvest the seed before I do. The low plants make easy pickings.

The two garbanzos I have are uncommon & worth growing elsewhere; so while I may never get a good harvest myself, my goal is to just grow enough seed to share with gardeners in more hospitable climates.

Hmm good to know. I will try the ones I have in my colder gardens and see how they do there. It's rarely over 85f there all summer.

 

[flowerbug]

Garbanzos (or at least the two I've grown) can be challenging. They don't like summer heat, and my Spring is too short. Planting them in locations that get afternoon shade seems to help... wish I had done that this year. The pods also have very little moisture resistance, so rains during ripening will cause heavy losses due to rot and/or sprouting. This year, heat did them in - but I did get enough seed for another try. Most years, the plants survive, but late summer rains destroy most of the seed.

And if by chance I do get a good year, mice will probably harvest the seed before I do. The low plants make easy pickings.

The two garbanzos I have are uncommon & worth growing elsewhere; so while I may never get a good harvest myself, my goal is to just grow enough seed to share with gardeners in more hospitable climates.

all good to know, so it isn't too likely they'll do great here, but i'd probably still like to try them as sometimes we can actually get a dry enough fall (not this year for sure but in some previous years we've had long dry spells in the early fall so that worked out well for the more rot sensitive beans).

as it has turned out this year i'm saving most of my later harvested seed for eating as the quality for seed saving is poor, but here or there some of them are still ok. i'm impressed the Yellow Eye did as well - the pods looked pretty bad but the seeds inside were mostly ok. i picked them pretty often because i really wanted a good harvest of these. turns out i was right in that and they dried down ok. other beans like the Purple Dove definitely do not like to be repeatedly wetted down but they are edible even if they don't look as nice. it's just when they get active mold growing on them or the hilum looks too dark and is infected with mold i won't eat those so the worms get them instead. still it means for a lot of work in sorting these but i often have to look at each hilum anyways because they sometimes have a bit stuck to them that i have to remove. yes, one at a time... ocd... what can i say?

 

[Blue-Jay]

Bluejay77's Big Bean Show
Day 1
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Abundant Little Gem - Bush Dry, Pinto
Last year in 2020 I had posted a list of Robert Lobitz beans I was still missing from my collection on the Seed Savers Exchange Facebook page. Well the director of preservation told me he had most of those beans and graciously sent them to me. This bean is one of about 23 he sent me. I grew 20 of them this summer.

African Premier Segregation 2 - Bush Dry.
In 2014 I had acquired African Premier from an Illinois grower only to find his bean was pretty outcrossed. I had remembered the seed color and shape of the bean from my grow outs in the early 80's. It was a short plump bean and I got a few of those in my 2014 grow out but also a number of off types and some had the African Premier coloring but kidney shaped seed and other colors. So I decided to persue a couple of them. I managed to get one so far stable and it's on my website named Pink Emperor. Larger than a kidney and pink with a subtle blue under color and flat no gloss seed coat. This year I grew two more of those off types from 2014 this one is it's working title. It was similar to Pink Emperor that it has the bluish under color but darker and glossy.


Abundant Little Gem..........................................................African Premier 2

African Premier 2 produced one off type.


African Premier 2 off type


African Premier 4 - Bush Dry. This one with this working title seemed attractive to me for it's dark red seed coat with purple speckling. The grow out was very productive. An 8 foot section of row produced 1 pound 11 ounces of beans (778 grams). I just didn't get a lot of beans from the one I was after but other off types that have showed up in the previous 2014 grow out of African Premier. I will grow this dark one out again to see if it will produce more of itself



African Premier 4 produced two off types that have shown up in previous grow outs. The second off type is exactly what Pink Emperor looks like.


African Premier 4.1..............................................................................African Premier 4.2

 

[Blue-Jay]

Bluejay77's Big Bean Show
Day 1​

Amber Pearl - Bush Dry.

A short compact plant that leaned over a little then reoriented it's leaves and branches to the sun and appeared all summer long to be standing strait up while holding it short pods well off the ground. This is another of the many of the late Robert Lobitz's original named beans that Robert introduced through the Seed Savers Exchange yearbook in 1999.

Andante - Pole Lima

I know a fellow from Iowa that grows lima beans a lot and he has done some crossing of Ping Zebra with other limas in his collection. This bean is one of the results of his efforts. He sent me the bean in 2018 and he told me if I ever could think of a good name for it let him know. Well after harvesting it's new seeds this year I thought I had lost the bean that all the plants must have segregated into this white lima. What you see in this photo has taken already two months just to get it to this point. The bean will darken further if kept out of the freezer. I'm going to see what it looks like by the end of December. So with the slow tempo of it's darkening I thought the word Andante fit this little lima perfectly for it's name and the fellow in Iowa thought so too.


Amber Pearl......................................................................................Andante


Andante - Pole Lima

This photo is seed I received from this fellow in Iowa. He must have allowed this bean to cure for who knows maybe a year or two.

Andante - Pole Lima

Andromeda - Pole Lima

I've showed this lima last year and grew out last years newly discovered seed this summer. I decided I would give it this name. The bean comes from an off type I found in Ping Zebra in a 2017 grow out. I almost didn't grow out the off type seed in fact I was adding the bean to my bean soup mix of beans and was intending just to eat them all. For the heck of it I decided to grow out those not really exciting off types last year and Oh ! what it resulted in was...... I think amazing. I can not even be sure that this bean produced any off types because I was picking a maroon colored bean but it was in such scanty amounts that it could have come from it's growing neighbor that sent out runners to try colonize this beans trellis as pole beans so often do. So this bean may or may not be stable yet. I will of course do more grow outs to see if it's currently a true breeding type


Andromeda

 

[heirloomgal]

@Bluejay77 it is remarkable how dark that brown and white lima got. It's almost like a magic trick or science experiment. 'Watch the veins appear' as I wave this wand sort of thing. It still amazes me how much those type of lima beans look like diagrams of human lungs.