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

[flowerbug]

...Something weird about this year for beans.

i think i did pretty well here but i also have to factor in a lot of groundhog predation and the long dry spell we had.

 

[Zeedman]

Ooo, look. Out of stock, year after year. Alright, bean people. How can we find this bean?!?!

Only 3 beans per packet - and out of stock???

Maybe here:
Akahana mame

 

[heirloomgal]

It was not the best year for my bean growing, but some did fairly well.

In 2019 I got a pole bean from someone called Night Sky and threw off a segregation. I have grown the segregation a couple of time but not always taking photos of it. It has not thrown off any off types. So I decided to name it. I thought what is in the night sky. Well constellations of course and probaby the first one to come to mind and easy to remember is the Big Dipper. So this bean is now called Big Dipper

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Pole Dry - Night Sky...................................................................Pole Dry - Big Dipper

This bean (Bobolink) from the state of Maine has been in John Withee's collection of 1,183 beans. I've been growing it for the last several years and the weather has not been cooperating each time I plant it. I haven't had a good cropl of Bobolink probably in about 10 years. 90% of 2023's crop of this bean are in the photo

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Pole Dry - Bobolink

Big Dipper! What a great name for a bean that originates from *Night Sky*. Very nice.

Well, I think it's time to pack up the beanz! Tonight is the night to begin. I will get it shipped by Friday.

And in other outdated news...

 

[flowerbug]

...
And in other outdated news...

wow am i hungry... tanks for dat!

 

[Beanmad Nanna]

technical difficulties... it will not come up for me either. could be their hosting service went down and has not been restored yet or some other issue. hopefully they will be back eventually.

try this for now:

Bohnen-Atlas - Startseite

Der Bohnen-Atlas ist Nachschlagewerk fr Bohnensorten. Er beinhaltet Beschreibungen, die durch Bilder und Kommentare der Nutzer erweitert werden knnen.

web.archive.org

Will try again with that link - some links I was trying to access from one of the german seed-saving circles weren't working . Relieved it wasn't just me being clunky.

 

[Beanmad Nanna]

I'm disappointed in the results of my network bean growing this year - sorry Russ. It's not been an easy season in the part of England I'm in. We had a warm June but the rest of the summer failed to have much of the warmth which beans enjoy. This meant that some varieties which need a long season didn't make it in time. So of the nine network varieties I had to grow, three have failed. Tennessee Cutshort died mysteriously, Ilene failed to prosper and hardly produced any pods at all and Kermit's Smoky Mountain failed to dry down in time. I shall try these three again next season as I have a small number of seeds left.

Here though are the varieties I've managed to collect at least 60 seeds from.

Etna - a good dwarf drying bean. It produced early and plentifully and dried down well.

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Freckles - my other network dwarf bean. Another good dried bean. The seed I produced had quite a lot more white than the seed I received which was predominantly red. This has been the case with other varieties, so it seems that my soil produces beans with quite a lot of white, especially in these Jacob's Cattle type seed coats.

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Heavenly Gold. This is a wax Romano type which I thought was wonderful! It produced prolifically, remained tender and stringless come what may, and then dried down beautifully too. Probably my favourite bean of the season. The seed is a bit variable in quality but there's plenty of it.

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Headrick Greasy Cutshort. This was prolific too, producing lots of quite short, curved pods. It was quite late producing and I didn't sample any for eating but it continued to dry down well after I'd really thought I wouldn't get seed from it. I've labelled the photo 'Headrick's' but it's Headrick.

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Skunk. As others have said, I think, this is a beautiful bean to shell. The pods dried over quite a prolonged period but made for easy shelling with very attractive, consistently good quality seeds

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Doty India #1. Another drying bean. This was also quite late for me, and was another one I thought wouldn't make it. But it has dried down indoors, the snag being that it had quite a lot of split beans, presumably because I was having to harvest late in damp conditions. But I have just 64 seeds in total, with perhaps a few more to come.

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Re Freckles

Just checking my understanding :
cooler weather, and maybe shadier site, might be linked to more white showing on these types
because more of the darker colour when its been a hotter season?

thanks

 

[heirloomgal]

@Beanmad Nanna is production also on your list of qualities you look for in beans?

 

[Beanmad Nanna]

@Beanmad Nanna is production also on your list of qualities you look for in beans?

I find it hard to know sometimes whether it is a poor doer, inherent to bean or if its an off season or patch in the ground which has meant poor pod production or seed set.


In terms of trying to 'decide' criteria on which to try to maintain a particular sort, then quality and quantity of FOOD and seedstock has to be a consideration (for me as an individual with finite resources eg time, space).
In a hierarchy of decisions over limited space & energies to grow veg, high quality gastronomy or coping with wet/cold or drought/heat or disease resistance/health would have to be strong, if a variety set sparse seed. ( Cost benefit analysis ).
So if it was good in at least some respect, despite low productivity (weight of crop taken to the table), yes of course I want (personally) to maintain beans coping with range of extremes. (Food security) .
And in all honesty, it might just be that I find it especially curious or attractive aesthetically. ( So I potentially de-rail myself ).

As a biologist, I strongly advocate for maintaining as broad a range as we can ... am passionate about it

 

[Beanmad Nanna]

I’m feeling refreshed after a small leguminous furlough. Was inspired tonight to lurk around in the bean cupboard for my 'last of the last' shelled dried beans for 2023. I didn't get weights for any of the late, late ones. It's a love/loathe relationship with these - they really made me fret and sweat that they might not make it/ but they did and produced like beasts. Well, some of them.

I’ll start with the ones which made me feel slightly sweaty, and only medium level woebegone. I forgive them now though.

Cape Sugar network bean
(sorry kitchen lighting is dim and photos are bad, but you can see the scale number at least) 6 plants
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Liscek network bean 4 plants
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Grandma Gina 8 plants (direct seeded and you can tell by this yield, though I don't think this is a super yielder for dry beans anyway, all the energy goes into pods)
Still had some splitting with this bean as you can see, but not near as bad as I had in 2021.
View attachment 61712


This is the heart palpitation giving group. Little more intense sense of maturity related despondency.

La Vigneronne 4 plants
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Gray Mountain network bean 4 plants
For some reason a single pod had seeds that were more purple. But the pod had been dropped on the ground and left in the rain, and I found it a week later. That might have caused some weirdness.
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Lavender Swirl network bean 2 plants
I'm still in shock that I went from thinking I'd get no beans at all, to every pod actually maturing and drying down.
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These ones are the real little kingpin bean guerillas, they take the meaniing of *on tenterhooks* to the next level. THANK GOODNESS only one of them was a network bean! But, hey, they made it! I got nearly every single pod of all three of these varieties to dry down. The last few of Sastre I pitched since the seed were too small.

Hope springs eternal in the bean world!!

Facciosa 4 plants
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Zugdidi Flat cake, network bean 4 plants
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Sastre 4 plants
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ones which made me feel slightly sweaty, and only medium level woebegone

I so relate!
looking forward to the feast of this post

 

[Beanmad Nanna]

I feel very lucky. I am able to allow beans sit at room temperature all year long and no bean weevils hatch out of my seed. So I have determinded that there are probably no bean weevils in the county. I do definitely know what these creatures look like and the perfectly round holes they make in the seed when they eat their way out of the seed. When I lived in the county west of here in the mid 1970's and early 1980's I experienced weevils in beans I grew there. My first experience came about by accident just a little before Christmas 1975 when I was going to fill a seed request. I opened a container of beans and saw a few holes in a couple of beans. I poured out the beans in the container and at the bottom I saw the live weevils moving around. I instantly knew what to do. I said to myself freezing kills bugs. So all the containers went into the freezer which was running at about -25 below zero F. -31 C for three days. I had later read that a temperature of 0 F -17 C for about three days is a successfull treatment for bean weels to keep them from hatching out of your bean seed. So each year after that all the beans went into the freezer at around the third week of November.

These days all the bean seed stocks here are kept frozen anyway for seed viabilty longevity the year round. I allow seed to dry until after the middle of November before packing them away in the freezer.

I have on one occassion received seed from someone in Europe that looked perfectly normal. Within about a week about two or three beans began to hatch out weevils. I put the ziploc packet in the freezer for about 5 days. Planted the seed that didn't have holes the following season and all was well. I got a nice crop of seed from that bean that summer.

These days all the bean seed stocks here are kept frozen anyway for seed viabilty longevity the year round. I allow seed to dry until after the middle of November before packing them away in the freezer

Reading these threads, I am changing how I store ALL my beans. I have gotten away with healthy beans for many years, but have sometimes lost peas stores to weevils. I now know how to do better - thank you