2023 Little Easy Bean Network - Beans Beyond The Colors Of A Rainbow

[Ridgerunner]

Now for the long awaited last post in this series. One of the segregations out of Blue Jay produced a solid black pole bean. As pure black as I've seen. I called it Midnight at the Oasis after the Maria Muldair song. That's too long to write on the marker so I shortened these to Oasis.

Oasis 1 has repeated once. When it is fresh it has a green color but soon dries to a black. Takes just a few days. But after it ages it turns into an olive shade. That top photo doesn't do it justice. Not sure if it is a half runner or a pole. It was grown in 2022.

Oasis 2 is a new segregation grown in 2021. A pole.

Oasis 3 is a new segregation grown in 2021. A pole.

Oasis 4 repeated once. It was grown in 2022 and is a bush.

That concludes the bean show. Russ, I'll send all these to you after you get back from Florida. Some of what I send you will be all I have but I have reserves of many. It depends on how well they produced when I grew them. I'll wait until you tell me you received the shipment before I eat them.

It has been fun. I appreciate the chance to have grown these.

 

[BeanieQueen]

Been trying to play a little catch up with pictures for beans I didn't take any photos of after this summer's grow out. I thought I had got them all, but as I go down the list I see there are several I missed. I really do need outdoors summer sunlight to take good photos with my old device, but for now my grow lights will have to do. Thought I'd share a few. I actually bought the green mug bowl in a thrift store today just to be able to use it for bean photos. lol

Ugandan Bantu
View attachment 54581

Oh.. those terrific Ugandan Bantu..!! I just love them!
Lucky you!!

By the way: last week I was on a website of the Canadian PEI Seed Alliance and wanted to order Ugangan Bantu (and two other varieties), but this is just another company which doesn't want to ship abroad! And also the Seed Savers Exchange wants so exchange their seeds only on their home continent..

But I think the reason might be "Under new rules the European Union now requires phytosanitary certification on imported plant products."
This is really frustrating..

 

[meadow]

Has anyone seen Shinshu runner bean? They're enormous! (seen on Strictly Medicinal Seeds website; not sure if it is okay to link)

The description says "Germination is like a small earthquake."

 

[Blue-Jay]

But I think the reason might be "Under new rules the European Union now requires phytosanitary certification on imported plant products."
This is really frustrating..

Does Jewelry Beans still work to get beans to you. The phytosanitary certificate might be to protect every little single sale European seed Co's might get instead of imports.

 

[heirloomgal]

if you've been keeping track of your plants and checking seeds as they dry down you might notice how conditions may change the colors of the seed coats.

i've seen that myself where some seeds that finished earlier in cooler temperatures had different colors than those that ripened and dried down later when it was warmer and then again as the season came to an end. also the nutrients available in each location of each plant can change the color of the seed coat.

i think it is just a part of learning about each variety as you grow it through several years as to what it does and how it responds to the various conditions. some beans are more obviously reactive than others or more finicky.

some notables for me were Blaugrau, Bomba, Fort Portal Jade, Money, Nonna Agnes and recently with Tinker's Fire.

even the less finicky beans can still give some variations (Purple Dove is a good example in this regards as it has been very reliable and decently productive almost every place i grow it, but the seed coat color definitely changes depending upon where i plant it, the better the garden soil the better the color).

and i sure wished my Fukuruyu Chanaga beans had produced at all let alone such nice ones as those in your picture. and Bantu is a wonderfully colorful mix. do they come true to color for each one planted or are you getting different colors from each seed planted? have you had to cull out ones that don't match or are you letting them give variations? i've found that almost everyy bean i grow for several years will give me things to cull out if i want to keep it true to what i started with.

I think you may be right, that soil conditions may be playing a role. That, or some kind of genetic drift. I've actually also seen beans become less 'colored up' in fertile soil. When I grew Vaquero as a network bean last year it looked cow-ish with the black & white patterning. Every bean I harvested from the row in fall was white, with slight black speckles on some of the beans, but not all. It was as if they needed drought or less fertility to express that cow coloration. But the Bonntjies bean I grew in 2022 as a network bean, did the opposite. It was a very pale speckled pink when I planted it, and in fall all the seeds were quite a dark pink speckle. It's all certainly interesting to see how the expressions change in different locations.

My Ugandan Bantu beans were purchased only the year I planted them, as I didn't have much left from the last time I grew them; they came from Salt Spring Seeds and I was placing an order there anyway so I threw in a pack of those. I don't know if they will come true to type from each color, but I too have wondered that. My guess is they wouldn't, I think it's a landrace but I'm not 100% sure. Also, there was a number of tan seeds that I harvested and I don't recall planting any, or many, of those colored ones from the packet. I felt like I harvested some colors I didn't remember planting.

This was a picture I took in 2017 from the first packet, and as you can see there is still quite a bit of variation in the seeds. It's probably a jungle of genetics in this variety. Some of the seeds seem to jump from round and small to kidney shaped.

 

[flowerbug]

I think you may be right, that soil conditions may be playing a role. That, or some kind of genetic drift. I've actually also seen beans become less 'colored up' in fertile soil. When I grew Vaquero as a network bean last year it looked cow-ish with the black & white patterning. Every bean I harvested from the row in fall was white, with slight black speckles on some of the beans, but not all. It was as if they needed drought or less fertility to express that cow coloration. But the Bonntjies bean I grew in 2022 as a network bean, did the opposite. It was a very pale speckled pink when I planted it, and in fall all the seeds were quite a dark pink speckle. It's all certainly interesting to see how the expressions change in different locations.

My Ugandan Bantu beans were purchased only the year I planted them, as I didn't have much left from the last time I grew them; they came from Salt Spring Seeds and I was placing an order there anyway so I threw in a pack of those. I don't know if they will come true to type from each color, but I too have wondered that. My guess is they wouldn't, I think it's a landrace but I'm not 100% sure. Also, there was a number of tan seeds that I harvested and I don't recall planting any, or many, of those colored ones from the packet. I felt like I harvested some colors I didn't remember planting.

This was a picture I took in 2017 from the first packet, and as you can see there is still quite a bit of variation in the seeds. It's probably a jungle of genetics in this variety. Some of the seeds seem to jump from round and small to kidney shaped.
View attachment 54629

i would not replant any of the odd patterned beans or ones that weren't the right shape or colors.

 

[heirloomgal]

Have you considered planting the beige ones to see what happens?

This is only the 3rd time I've grown it since 2016, but no I haven't ever planted the beige ones, mostly because I tend to like the purple ones more. But the plant seems to be trending to beige a bit more than to purple. I recently found a photo of them from 2017 and the seeds were crappy (I didn't water my gardens as well back then and I used to just put seed in ground so they were often not mature by fall) but the color was much better then. I may have picked out the beiger ones, or there may have just been less of them and I didn't catch any when I grabbed a couple seeds. I haven't seen a single blue colored one since this grow out. Which is really too bad because in all the slight variations, it's my favorite one.

 

[heirloomgal]

i would not replant any of the odd patterned beans or ones that weren't the right shape or colors.

I don't think, for now, that there are any 'wrong' shapes or colors per say, I think they are all just expressions buried within the genetic variation of the original seeds that were collected in Africa. @Pulsegleaner and I, I think, have talked about this in previous posts. It's likely a bunch of various beans brought back from somewhere in Uganda, possibly all landraces, and then given a fixed name.

 

[heirloomgal]

Oh.. those terrific Ugandan Bantu..!! I just love them!
Lucky you!!

By the way: last week I was on a website of the Canadian PEI Seed Alliance and wanted to order Ugangan Bantu (and two other varieties), but this is just another company which doesn't want to ship abroad! And also the Seed Savers Exchange wants so exchange their seeds only on their home continent..

But I think the reason might be "Under new rules the European Union now requires phytosanitary certification on imported plant products."
This is really frustrating..

Yes, it's sad @BeanieQueen but nearly all Canadian seed companies have stopped shipping to both the US and Europe. I find that tragic. There were some changes to the US seed customs policy in the last few years which make it impossible to get certain kinds of seeds across anymore, even from Canada - peppers and tomatoes for sure. Thank goodness @Bluejay77 has an import permit for small lots of seeds! And the EU seems to have put a blockade in place as well, so Canadian seed companies are now getting too high a percentage of their seed parcels returned. I can only imagine how frustrating that might be. Maybe you know someone in England that could help you? As far as I know, that is the one place in Europe still free to accept seeds.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I don't think, for now, that there are any 'wrong' shapes or colors per say, I think they are all just expressions buried within the genetic variation of the original seeds that were collected in Africa. @Pulsegleaner and I, I think, have talked about this in previous posts. It's likely a bunch of various beans brought back from somewhere in Uganda, possibly all landraces, and then given a fixed name.

My bantu (from the Richter's seed supply direct from Joe) all ended up looking like the rounded purple beans in your photo. What was in the original packet was a wider range of colors (like yours) but were still all that same rounded shape, with the exception of one mustard colored seed that was longer and flatter (that did not come up).

Based on that, I'd actually take a sort of middle ground on what is and is not Bantu*. ALL of the rounded ones are probably Bantu, which, as I said, is probably a catch-all for anything that looks like Fort Portal Jade but isn't green. Except maybe the black, that's pretty far from the other shades.

The longer ones, and the mottled ones, are a bit harder to make a call on. They MIGHT be other kinks in the line, or other beans that got mixed in or even crosses between Bantu and other beans. Ditto the round one with the mark on the side (I can't tell if that is mottling or scarring).

When I did Mottled Grey, I came to the conclusion that, not only was it not a single variety, but, in a real sense, it didn't even EXIST as something separate, since nearly all of the beans that made it up were identical to other established ones from the area. The speckled were identical to Pebblestone. The solid purple-black ones were the same as Fort Portal Violet (they even have it's most noticeable trait of having extremely dark mottling on the germinating cotyledons.

Take those away, and you took away 90% of the sample. What you had left was Night Sky (the long purple one with the occasional white speckle and NO cot mottle) a few ones with the Pebblestone coat but different shapes (either wider or shorter, or both) some small maroon beans, some small greyish tan ones, and two tan with brown streaks (neither of which came up) None of these really seemed to fit "Mottled Grey" as a description (the speckled start purple on white, and when they have aged they're black on tan, not grey), so, as far as I am concerned, the name is defunct.