reedy
Deeply Rooted
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2015
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i think i need to abandon any pretense of really knowing what some of these beans from both Monster and Domino might have come from because while i can make a division based upon patterns and shapes by now they could have crossed. so really i should only speak in terms of things i know for sure which i have certain records of and then just let the history alone because i have no way to sort it out 100% short of tracing the genetics.
That's why I gave up on trying to track where a new bean may have come from. Used to when I grew just a few kinds and mostly for use as green beans, it was uncommon and easy to spot when a new one showed up. When I started growing a lot of beans and a lot of kinds for use as dry beans, I started finding them all the time.
Now when I get a new bean from the network or even from a commercial source, I grow them in semi-isolation to keep them as pure as possible in the first season and to see if anything off-type shows up. If it does, I add the off type to my bean soup mix, but I don't try to track the segregations that happen in the second or third season.
To make it even a little more difficult is that there are other ways a crossed bean shows up aside from just the color of the seed coat. I planted some Pinto beans from the grocery store several years ago and now have the Pinto looking seed coat in a wide variety of beans. Some are bush, some semi-runner, some full pole bean sized. Some seeds are large and flat, some small and spherical, some are crowded in the pods and flat on one end, like a greasy cut short.
When I sort and plant a specific one of those Pinto looking beans, any and all of the types may show up as well as beans with other colored seed coats. I don't know if the original beans I planted were already all mixed up or if it happened in my garden.