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

[meadow]

It says hello! (Yessica's Inca Bean)
View attachment 54756

Hello! She's a beauty.

 

[nune]

Welcome back from the outage, everyone! Here's another bean update from yours truly.

 

[flowerbug]

...But a couple things I'd be curious to hear people's thought on. He believes all beans, though I imagine he's referring to P.vulgaris in particular, have inbreeding depression. I was very surprised to read this! My initial thought was this seems difficult to imagine since the fertility apparatus of beans is designed to self pollinate? But I wonder if there is something I'm missing to this perspective?

he's referencing what @Jack Holloway is talking about when you get beans continually selected from a small population, they are almost always self pollinating with only a few out crosses showing up (depending upon how closely you follow them and sort and examine as you shell and then select for replanting). so the genetic mixing that is happening among those plants is not much (or they'd show up as the dominant and recessives would mix).

having grown many beans now for long enough you do find some varieties which are not very strong - they can use some crossing and if you can keep their general habit and seed coat while also improving them in other ways then it's not a loss at all. but after doing all that work i'd give them a different name and reference back to the parental stock.

According to him, we are unable to properly assess the inbreeding depression because we compare all beans to other inbred beans.

if you grow enough different kinds you get a sense of that is possible, but then i'm (going to wander off a bit) also thinking about perhaps i don't want a ton of production from some plants because i do not want them to deplete the garden soil. there is such a thing as soil depletion and i want to pay attention to how the garden is doing over all through a longer period of time. the base carrying capacity of any soil is one of those things a sustainable gardener should think about. generally if you are returning what is grown in a garden to that garden plus any other food scraps you might have and watch what the plants do for growing you should be able to grow fairly indefinitely. rain and wind give you some nutrients and animals can provide others as they wander around (pigeons can gather a lot of bugs and then process them for you and give you fertilizer)... etc... ok, i think i've wandered back now. ...

Of course, I'm sure anyone who has found a cross in their bean patch sees the vigor with which it grows, but a cross is a relatively rare event. My feeling has been that beans leans toward stability more so than instability naturally.

there is such a thing as hybrid vigor and that usually does not repeat with some of the next generations. at least i've sure been hoodwinked by some beans i've grown that threw off a lot of beans the next generation and then went to grow those and had completely mixed results. it takes time to winnow through them all when you get plants spinning off a few dozen selections. i have some beans that almost every bean i planted turned out to be something else with few going back to the original parental type and others doing all sorts of things.

after a while, combinatorially it's impossible for a single person to grow and evaluate all these new beans so you have to pick your next planting rounds with some plans and goals in mind.

here's an interesting reference which i've got on my pile to read sometime. as i'm waylaid by other projects for the next several months i'm not going to get to it but i think it covers a lot of the same topics:


_Return To Resistance_
Third edition,revised
by Raoul A. Robinson


1SharebooksPublishing
www.sharebooks.ca
© Raoul A. Robinson, 1996, 2004, 2007.

https://permies.com/t/158668/a/155245/Return-to-Resistance.pdf?download_attachment=true

 

[ducks4you]

Received my chili beans mixed seeds from Vermont Bean Co.
Gotta find a fence for them to climb.

 

[meadow]

Received my chili beans mixed seeds from Vermont Bean Co.
Gotta find a fence for them to climb.

Those are all bush beans.

 

[ducks4you]

That's ok, I have plenty of room for them.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I've watched a few Joseph Lofthouse videos lately, and read a little bit too. Some of the material specifically about beans. It's all been rather interesting and none of what he's talking about is familiar to me. I've always come from a preservationist point of view, with an interest in celebrating and keeping alive the wonder of man's work in the world of beans. I've actually had goals quite opposite to his as a gardener, because varietal purity is important to me.

But a couple things I'd be curious to hear people's thought on. He believes all beans, though I imagine he's referring to P.vulgaris in particular, have inbreeding depression. I was very surprised to read this! My initial thought was this seems difficult to imagine since the fertility apparatus of beans is designed to self pollinate? But I wonder if there is something I'm missing to this perspective? According to him, we are unable to properly assess the inbreeding depression because we compare all beans to other inbred beans. Of course, I'm sure anyone who has found a cross in their bean patch sees the vigor with which it grows, but a cross is a relatively rare event. My feeling has been that beans leans toward stability more so than instability naturally.

Joseph is a lot more active on the OSSI site (which I also belong to). Pretty much his technique for EVERYTHING is to make landraces and grexes, and make them as diverse as possible. A lot of the work he does with tomatoes (as do many others on the site) seems to involve trying to make as many as possible be outcrosses rather than self pollinators, as well as cross the domestic tomato with pretty much every other species in the Lycopersicon branch of Solanum(originally, I though they were trying to just bring in the disease and condition resistances of those, but now it looks like they want to being in ALL possible genes from all of them.)

Joseph tends to want his mixes as genetically diverse as possible (I fully believe his ultimate goal is the universal grex, a crop population containing, and capable of spawning, EVERY conceivable combination of genes possible for a given species).

This means that his stuff tends to be sort of vague with regard to what you can and can't expect it to develop. This is great if you want a wide playing field, but if you are looking for something specific, it's hard to tell if it is there or not, not least because Joseph does not actually pay attention to what the actual crop LOOKS like (I asked him a while back to confirm that his Rocky Mountain Wheat Grex was high in compactum (club) wheats (since the photo he had supplied seemed to suggest this. He replied he could neither confirm nor deny this, since the term held no meaning for him. So, assuming it ever comes back into stock, it's buy, plant and hope for the best.)

BTW if anyone knows any named club wheats BESIDES Mt. Pima, please let me know (that one is not suitable for my purpose, it's too messy.)

 

[meadow]

BTW if anyone knows any named club wheats BESIDES Mt. Pima, please let me know (that one is not suitable for my purpose, it's too messy.)

I hadn't even heard of club wheat before but it seems to be a thing here (Washington state). Is this of any help? They do mention names, including the most recent cultivars:

The origins of club wheat - WA Grains

Not quite a Marvel prequel, but the evolution of club wheat is still important to modern-day breeding programs.

wagrains.org

 

[ducks4you]

I was so excited to get my chili bean seeds that I didn't read the package well.
Could've said, arsenic, and I wouldn't have noticed.

 

[Eleanor]

BTW if anyone knows any named club wheats BESIDES Mt. Pima, please let me know (that one is not suitable for my purpose, it's too messy.)

Three clubs that should do well for you in the lower Hudson Valley are Jezka Hladka, Ostka Skomoroska, and Sandomierka - all fall-planted.