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

[saritabee]

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.

Oh my gosh, I was literally just thinking that. I have been working on Frost as a network bean since 2019 and have never yet gotten enough good seed to send back. 2019 was extremely poor quality seed in a season where almost everything else grew flawlessly. 2020 was actually better quality so I was hopeful; but still not enough really good-looking seeds to send back. This year I planted TRIPLE the amount of Frost as I did anything else........ and the rabbits picked off EVERY SINGLE ONE (and it was the only variety they completely decimated like that). Luckily I still have enough from the other two growouts for one or two more tries...

 

[Artorius]

Wow, I like curses. I need to get the seeds for this bean. Perhaps in the mountains, whose symbol is a witch, it will be possible to lift this curse.

 

[saritabee]

How productive was Kroatische Strange? Looks so pretty on bohnen atlas.

I loved Kroatische Stange. I remember it growing like crazy, although I just checked my records and it produced about 4 ounces of seed. I'd only received two seeds from Bohnen-Atlas, though, so it still felt like a good return.

I'm going to grow it again next year as a control bean.

 

[flowerbug]

Oh my gosh, I was literally just thinking that. I have been working on Frost as a network bean since 2019 and have never yet gotten enough good seed to send back. 2019 was extremely poor quality seed in a season where almost everything else grew flawlessly. 2020 was actually better quality so I was hopeful; but still not enough really good-looking seeds to send back. This year I planted TRIPLE the amount of Frost as I did anything else........ and the rabbits picked off EVERY SINGLE ONE (and it was the only variety they completely decimated like that). Luckily I still have enough from the other two growouts for one or two more tries...

i've wanted to grow Frost for a number of years but the supply wasn't available and i never got back to it. as a pole bean i can't put it that high on my list. i won't even be looking at it again in several years with the list of projects i already have stacked up here.

you'll need to fence that area or pre-start them in pots and hope they survive a transplant or even just keep them in pots if you can afford the space and supports.

 

[saritabee]

you'll need to fence that area or pre-start them in pots and hope they survive a transplant or even just keep them in pots if you can afford the space and supports.

They were transplants with a couple sets of leaves on them; the rabbits didn't actually bother them in the spring when there was a bunch of other greenery to eat, but once that 100+ heat wave set in in the summer they started chewing through the stems of the pole beans. Extremely frustrating to come out in the morning and find a random 5' tall bean plant just wilted dead on the string. I got a rabbit fence for my birthday (lol) in July, but Frost had been the first to go. Other bean plants just got picked off one at a time here or there, one every couple nights.

I had all my bush beans in pots near a rockery, and the funny thing was the rabbits would hop up in the pots to get at the delicious weeds growing out of the rockery. So it didn't seem like they actually wanted the beans, per se.

...............now that I type that out, I wonder if I've been blaming the rabbits this whole time, but it was actually the mountain beaver. They eat tree saplings, and a pole bean stem looks an awful lot like a tree sapling.

At least I have my rabbit fence up now, and it clearly keeps out both rabbits and mountain beavers, so... *fingers crossed*.

 

[saritabee]

Wow, I like curses. I need to get the seeds for this bean. Perhaps in the mountains, whose symbol is a witch, it will be possible to lift this curse.

@Bluejay77 , do you have enough starter seed left for Artorius? If not, I can send you most of the ugly seed I have, so he can give it a try next year.

Seems like the first step in curse-breaking is always discovering the curse. Now that we know it's cursed, we can fix it!

 

[flowerbug]

i'd never heard of mountain beavers before so that sent me down a great pile of reading this afternoon just for the heck of it. i needed a break from cleaning... interesting creatures for sure. not at all what i expected from the name.

 

[saritabee]

T

i'd never heard of mountain beavers before so that sent me down a great pile of reading this afternoon just for the heck of it. i needed a break from cleaning... interesting creatures for sure. not at all what i expected from the name.

They're really neat! Nobody I've talked to here has heard of one before, even though they're native to the Pacific Northwest and apparently fairly common. It took my biologist sister a couple hours to track down what it was after it popped out of a burrow next to me when I was bushwhacking some blackberry vines. Startled me about as much as I probably startled it, lol.

Normally they're nocturnal, but I've seen ours about 3 times in the year and a half we've lived here. They're MUCH faster than you'd expect from the way they look. (This isn't mine, but is a cute picture of one; mine is so fast I haven't been able to catch it on camera yet... or at least nothing more than a blur.) For size reference, they're about the length of a cat.

size

 

[Blue-Jay]

Oh my gosh, I was literally just thinking that. I have been working on Frost as a network bean since 2019 and have never yet gotten enough good seed to send back. 2019 was extremely poor quality seed in a season where almost everything else grew flawlessly. 2020 was actually better quality so I was hopeful; but still not enough really good-looking seeds to send back. This year I planted TRIPLE the amount of Frost as I did anything else........ and the rabbits picked off EVERY SINGLE ONE (and it was the only variety they completely decimated like that). Luckily I still have enough from the other two growouts for one or two more tries...

Another thing I can tell you about my troubles with the Frost bean. I have ordered it in past years from a Seed Saver Exchange member in Montana. This person is the only source I know of that offers this pre 1796 bean. The first time he sent the beans in a bubble pack envelope and everything was fine. I had sent them out to network growers and the returns were hit and miss..... mostly miss. So I had ordered them from this same member a second time and he sent them in a letter envelope. Seems like he was trying to send his seeds out less expensively. I should use the term more cheaply. When the envelope arrived most of the seeds had been squirted out of one of the seams of the envelope as the post office runs letter envelopes through canceling machines and this also crushed many of the seeds. Letter envolopes is not the way you want to send larger seeds like beans, peas, and corn. There were lots of complaints to the fouding members of SSE in the organizations early days about members sending seeds in letter envelopes and the final results of that action. So in 2020 I sent out the scanty number of Frost seeds I had to a grower in California. He sent back in the fall. The largest and most beautiful Frost beans I had ever seen. I broke out his return packet into 5 samples. In 2021 5 growers wanted to grow Frost so all the seed was out to growers. For various reasons not a single return packet of Frost has come back for this past growing season.

I am going to order this bean again from this Montana member. My order will include a letter asking the seed not be sent in a letter envelope and I will include extra funds so he can afford to send the seed in a small box. I'm going to request that the seed not even be sent in a bubble pack envelope. I might even send my seed request form and payment in the small 6 x 4 x 4 inch box I use for mailing out seed. I will fill the box with the corn starch peanut shells I use also. This way he will even have the filler material for the return mailing. What could possibly go wrong !

 

[Blue-Jay]

@saritabee

If you have had bean failures due to rabbits then you have a pretty severe rabbit problem. You need to fence them out of your garden. Chicken wire will not stop them. They will find a way in. Try going to Menards and purchase the vinyl lattice pieces that are 2 feet wide by 8 feet long. More expensive but once you purchased them you will have them for countless seasons in the future. You can create a rabbit proof barrier around gardens with this material. I support the lattice pieces with steaks cut to 3 feet long with a well tapered point on one end to make it easier to drive them into the soil. Steaks made out of 1 x 2 inch furing strips 96 inches long. I use one steak at each end and one in the middle. If I need to cut the lattice to size for reason. I use a jigsaw which works very handily.