2022 Little Easy Bean Network - We Are Beans Without Borders

[Artorius]

@Bluejay77, unfortunately, the Bubblegum pods don't have a uniform pink color at the moment. Maybe later when they are more mature.



Hidatsa Shield Figure pods looks promising,



similarly Schwarze Kugel.



@heirloomgal, are your Floretas blooming? Mine not yet.

 

[Artorius]

@Bluejay77 , I'm curious how your Karachaganak Bush grows. Does he have any runners?

 

[heirloomgal]

I'm growing La Vigneronne as a network bean. It's a bean with splashes of red on the pods. Of the four plants I have, one is throwing plain green pods and is more vigorous that the true plants. I wondered whether there are any other reports of this stock of La Vigneronne having crossed or not being stable. I believe you have grown it, heirloomgal. Were yours all red splashed?
I imagine you want seeds only from the red splashed pods, Russ?


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I got seed for it this winter, but didn't have room for it this year. So I've no experience with the pods. Beautiful photos though!

 

[heirloomgal]

Yesterday was mostly about pea harvest, but here's an updated pic of my wall o beans (Seneca Allegheny Pinto) with some new cabbage neighbors where the garlic was last time.
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If you get closer, they do have a few new friends.

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Here's some cowpeas from @Zeedman with some pods. This is one of the MN varieties but I don't have my notes handy to know which.

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The limas that @flowerbug sent are also trying to make pods. They've got about a month left before frost is a big risk so we'll see.

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This is Cha Kura Kake soy from @Zeedman - again I don't have my notes so apologies if I butchered the name. I'm not really sure what to think of the yellowing. They seem to have gone from "I've got little pods!" to "Well I'm done" overnight, though admittedly I've been working a lot so it was probably over a couple week span. I'd be interested in thoughts on this.

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What a gorgeous wall of beans!

 

[heirloomgal]

@Bluejay77, unfortunately, the Bubblegum pods don't have a uniform pink color at the moment. Maybe later when they are more mature.

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Hidatsa Shield Figure pods looks promising,

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similarly Schwarze Kugel.

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@heirloomgal, are your Floretas blooming? Mine not yet.

Yes, I think they're blooming but still quite a bit slower than the others...

 

[heirloomgal]

Just gorgeous Pale Gray Lavender beans. The Mpumalanga Boontjes seed, I think I probably sent you one of the orignal donation samples that was probably grown in 2013. The color of the seed you got from me might have been harvested during some wet weather and the colors became washed out. That is only a guess of mine. What you have might be how the seed should look. When you do a seed return I will probably photo your seed and might replace the original photo on the website.

After what I wrote above I got curious about seed that had been grown in previous seasons of this bean. I took a look at seed in the freezer grown in 2018 and it is lighter that what you show on your photo. The 2017 seed is also light in tone. I sure do like the way your seed looks @heirloomgal. Is this bean growing as a semi runner?

I set the MB beans up with poles but they didn't touch them, they really grew more like a true bush. I do find that my soil seems to put darker colours on beans, like the Sicili network bean last year. The pink on those came out over more area on the seedcoats and darker. But that's a guess, I don't know what all accounts for the colour changes beans can do in different gardens.

Interestingly, the Pale Gray Lavender grew as a 100% bush bean. I put 4 plants around a pole and none of them climbed, or even bushed out in a big way. The good news is the seed quality was pretty good, but being small bushes and only planting 4 plants did not set me up to collect much seed! There is however many pods still out there, so there is still more to go and I may get 60 afterall. This has been a terrible year for the first bush beans I planted. The second planting I made a week and a half later have done much better size wise- bustier & more vigor. The trade off is the second planting still has green pods, while the first planting (both seeds as well as plants) is developing dried pods already even though the plants look puny.

 

[Blue-Jay]

@Artorius,

The person who grew them and named them sent me seed back from the pods they had that were pink bubblegum color. I grew some the next year and didn't get the same result. I wonder if the bubblegum color was just a time occurance and we won't ever see it again. Maybe it also requires just the most correct soil to have this pink bubblegum color to show up.

 

[Blue-Jay]

@Bluejay77 , I'm curious how your Karachaganak Bush grows. Does he have any runners?

The Karachaganak bush grows as a true bush, no runners. However they don't look healthy. They are short plants with yellowing and dry brown coloring around the edges of some of those yellowing leaves. There are varieties growing nearby in the same soil that look dark green and growing in a normal robust fashion. I have some of the Semi Runner Karachaganak growing in my pole bean plot around poles and they don't look very healthy either. I should take some photos of both grow outs.

 

[heirloomgal]

@Bluejay77, we are in a tiny town, last census 115, I am on the city board and we still have our own city water. It pulls from an aquafer that serves a low and rural population.
Our droughts usually don't affect growing seasons too much, although some field corn growers ended up simply baling up their fields in October, 2012 for animal fodder. THAT was a bad drought.
We also have many years where there can be too much rain. Last summer we had a single day deluge and neighbors 2 blocks over had 3 inches of water in their yards. It all went down by the next day.
Champaign/Urbana/Savoy, the triple cities north of us ALL get water from the Mahomet aquifer (15 miles west of Champaign), and Desani is sucking water from it to sell all over the place.
THEIR aquifer serves ~150K.
At some point, there might be a problem.

Wow ducks, that is shocking. Years ago I watched a documentary about the phenomenon of companies just showing up and collecting water wherever they please and bottling it, I think Nestlé was featured in it.

I've grown Scarlet Runner beans, very nice, huge plant with bright red flowers the hummers & bees love. I've had really good luck doing transplants with them. It's a big, big beautiful bean. I've never cooked them, but the English seem to really enjoy them cooked. I keep meaning to try them that way, but forget. I grow one runner bean every year, this year I'm growing Sunset Runner. Peach coloured flower. This was taken a week or two ago -

 

[flowerbug]

@ducks4you scarlet runner beans have done well here when i've transplanted potted starts (in 1 gallon pots). otherwise our season is not long enough for a good crop of dry seeds (which is my measure of how well they do).

like @heirloomgal i have not yet eaten the green pods to see how they taste but i've heard they're edible. the dry beans are to me a more coarse texture (some may consider it potatoey i dunno as tastes and preferences do vary) compared to many other dry beans. they too are edible to me, but because of the need for fence space and also the longer season i've not grown them in recent years - the remaining seeds of them that i have are in the odds-n-ends containers (which may get eaten at some point).