Welcome to the Latest (2022 Bean) Show on Earth!
*hangs head in shame*
It was just one thing after another all winter, until I got into the cycle of being ashamed it was taking so long that I put it off longer… like ya do.
Well, hopefully this will at least get y’all psyched up for planting season soon!
Last year’s bizarre weather meant that any beans planted before the beginning of June were actively stunted; but then when it finally got sunny, it stayed sunny – I didn’t do my final harvest until November (a few days before our first projected frost)! By the time seeds started getting dry enough to safely pack away, it was almost Christmas.
The very discouraging predations by the mystery animal continued (through the rabbit fence, plus the 2’ chicken wire apron I installed along the ground last summer), so this year I’m upgrading to deer-height fence, and hopefully the third time’s the charm. Most of what survived did so because I ended up making separate chicken-wire cages for each plant.
I did have a few successes, which makes me hopeful that I can begin to have at least mediocre results in this location.
I’ve been regrowing my bean network beans every year since the Terrible Bean Summer of 2019, and slowly getting at least a couple off the backlog every year. I was down to Lila Stuart, Davis, and Frost for 2022 – and the first two grew a decent amount of great-looking seed this year, so that was a weight off. Frost was still basically a loss – I got just enough seed to be able to try again in 2023, so hopefully Artorius had much better luck! I’ll have to go back after this and find his bean report. Lila Stuart below – more on Davis later.
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Russ’s version of Blue Shaxamaxon was one of the first beans I ever ordered because the pattern reminded me of the blue-speckled camping enamelware. I got two interesting outcrosses from the seeds I planted in 2018, both of which I really like and I’ve continued to work on – but nothing like the original! I finally planted the last of the originals I had, and almost all of them were eaten – but one plant survived, and it had the blue-speckled-enamel coloring!
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Kroatische Stange is one of my favorite beans, and I planted it this year because I was mainly only planting beans I had a ton of and that I knew would grow well. When I grew it in 2018 I got 4oz off of 4 plants. But for whatever reason – even though the seed was from 2018, and looked beautiful – only 3 seeds of the entire batch germinated. I didn’t get a lot of seed this year, but I at least got enough to try again another year.
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I had attempted Devil’s Finn in 2019, but got zero beans, and thought my line was defunct. As I was unpacking boxes the winter before last, I found three seeds tucked away in a separate tiny baggie. Two of those survived to maturity in 2021, and the seeds from those did well again this year, to the point that I now have a comfortable amount of seed.
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Blau-weisse von Bernarda was another of the previously-successful beans I planted to fill in the ranks this year, but thankfully it (unlike Kroatische Stange) continued to grow like crazy and was definitely my winner for the year. (This is only the final harvest; I got almost a pound of seed off 5 or 6 plants.)
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This was one skimpy plant’s worth of Harriet’s Black Hook, lol. (It was stunted by the cold weather, only grew half the height of the previous time I grew it, and still had a ton of green pods in November.) When I grew it for the Network in 2018, I got a pound of seed off two plants, and they grew almost 15’ tall… This thing makes a *lot* of beans.
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I also had a few fun outcrosses I’m excited about:
This came from a single plant's worth of seed I got in 2021, out of a semi-runner called Petit Gris; I planted that outcross this year, and it threw these new outcrosses (all pole). I find the drastic difference between the matte beans and the shiny beans really interesting.
This was a gorgeous outcross out of a bag of Rancho Gordo Good Mother Stallards.
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Now, for Davis: I need some help troubleshooting.
Has anyone else grown this before, and can weigh in on what the pattern should look like? I don’t know whether it’s a somewhat variable seedcoat pattern, or whether mine are outcrossed.
I’ve been fighting with this one since 2019 (in 2020, for example, I got a grand total of 3 seeds off a bunch of beautiful plants), and this year it did fantastic, which was exciting. However, as I was sorting all my beans last spring, I noticed that the beans I was planting did not have the same pattern as the leftover beans in the original baggie from Russ. I started the last 5 original beans in wet paper towels, to try and grow them for comparison, but none of them germinated (it was 2013 seed, I think, so it was already getting old in 2019). The original pattern was a brown soldier-ish pattern around the hilium, but rounded more like a shield than an actual soldier.
I had 32 plants this year, and the plant size/leaves/pods were all 100% identical. But every single plant produced beans with a somewhat different soldier pattern. I kept separate drying trays for every single plant so I could confirm this. The thing that makes me think this variety is maybe supposed to be this way, is that there was often some variation in pattern even within a given plant (see photo #5, for example).
I’ve gone through every packet of beans I have, and my entire camera roll for four years back plus my stash of bean photos on my computer, and cannot for the life of me find any examples of what the beans looked like the first year I grew them. (In 2020 and 2021 they looked the same as they do currently.) So I can’t tell whether they got outcrossed with me, or whether they were outcrossed the year before I got them, OR whether this is just how they are.
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@Bluejay77 , I’m putting the Lila Stuart in the mail this week -- do you want me to send a selection of the Davis I have, or do you think they got crossed up somewhere?
