2024 Little Easy Bean Network - Growing Heirloom Beans Of Today And Tomorrow

[heirloomgal]

The Deaflora store has the correct Gold und Silber seeds, that's where the ones I sowed in 2023 come from.

Stangenbohne Gold und Silber (Samen)

Phaseolus vulgaris var. vulgaris Zur Hälfte goldfarben, zur Hälfte weiß. Im weißen Anteil sind noch viele goldfarbene Flecken und Spritzer zu finden. Sehr hübsch!

deaflora.de

I have written to Deaflora and Guy Dirix about this bean. I'm curious to see their responses.

Keep us posted @Artorius. I'd love to hear the story of this bean, and about this outcross that @Decoy1 and I have. I wonder if our twin beans are originally from the same gene pool.

 

[heirloomgal]

I discovered an inadvertent perk of my new trellis; typically I lean the tall poles against the shed, or the eave of the house. Somewhere tall since I cut the trees to about 12 feet or more. But they always slide sideways and fall, and usually need to be put back several times a day. I lose beans when they do this too, as the crash can make pods erupt as happened several times in the last 2 weeks. Finally I have a solution! lol

Tried for a better pic of the Purple Dove cross.

Got a comparison picture of Santa Maria Pinquito with rice and lentils. It's under my stove range hood so lighting is off, but the size perspective is there. 3 grains of rice is equivalent in size to it, as is a lentil!

 

[Zeedman]

I re=grew the hyacinth beans which were smothered by weeds in the rural garden last year, to see what they would do under better conditions. Like everything else this year, they were planted (from transplants) in mid-July. They still took the entire 6' trellis, and were reaching for more.

Hyacinth bean "Early Meaty", from asiangarden2table. The flowers look a lot like sweet peas, and the vines are rampant; these might be good as an edible, decorative trellis or arbor cover. A lot of beans too, even planted late this far North. A keeper!

 

[flowerbug]

Yes, I've always attributed that shattering quality to wildness for seed dispersal effectiveness. Some of them even fling far and wide when the pods go. And it makes sense that it's an undesirable trait in dry beans, which is why I'm surprised to see it in several dry bean types this year. That said, none of these dry beans are commercial varieties. The Tinga peas this year REALLY fly far, I put 3 flats of drying pods in the sun last week and it was like listening to a popcorn maker. I had to go around the patio pavers picking up seeds later.

the pods which open very easily may not fling seeds as far as compared to those which have a bit more resistance. i've had lima beans flying across the room vs. Purple Dove which can move a ways but not as far.

my current hypothesis is that those beans which do not fly as far have a better resistance to white mold and some other hypothesis is that they may also finish closer to the same time and have more bush and semi-runner traits than pole beans.

note however, i do not grow a lot of pole beans here so it may also be observational biases from selecting mostly bush beans and some semi-runners...

it is also very likely that i won't get a chance to do any experiments to verify any of this stuff.

 

[flowerbug]

Well, well, well. The mystery of the last 'super vigorous' Purple Dove plant has explained itself. This is what the seeds look like...I thought the pods seemed kind of skinny compared to the others? I can say for sure though that the cross was between 2 snap bean varieties because these were scrumptiously good. I got the seeds from PEI Seed Alliance so they had the cross, and they're market gardeners first and foremost, I imagine that they grow lots of snap beans. One thing that carried over from Purple Dove - the rusty eye.

i may have some similar patterned beans but i won't see them again until i get the PD beans shelled out and i have thousands of them to do and many others besides... saw them in passing and didn't want to find yet another container to set aside at the time, so i can only point at the bag at the moment and say "They're in there..."

i like the red colors, also am not a fan of the rusty eye as you call it, i have some already crossed without the rusty eye but i also lost a lot of the other traits i like so they are not done yet.

i'm not sure what @Branching Out had for results this season but i think i did send them some of those white eyed seeds to grow and they might be willing to send some to you to see if you can get them to cross with those to perhaps eventually get a PD bean without the rusty eye. that is my goal. i'm not even sure if it is really possible (perhaps the traits i like are linked and can't be separated?), but i'll keep on trying.

 

[heirloomgal]

The beloved Mona Lisa... I realized after the fact that there is crud in this pic, I thought I had picked most of it out but Mona Lisa is one of those beans that holds a small white thread to it's eye when it's shelled. I tried rubbing the beans in batches between my palms to rub them off, but I guess it didn't work and I was rushing. I am pretty thrilled that I got as many beans as I did though!

Finally got a good grow out of the Coral bean @Blue-Jay, after my first try in 2021 I think it was. Such a lovely medley of colors! I probably shelled these a bit too soon, the pods had a bit of give in them still, but a week later they haven't developed wrinkled seedcoats as can happen. Thank goodness! I'm trying to hold back in my haste to get shelling done and find my living room again.

I also did a bit of weighing bean lots today. I did network bean Fat Man - 3 (possibly 4, can't recall if all survived) plants gave me 1 1/4 pounds so far, and then I found 2 more boxes that need to be shelled this evening. Wow, such an impressive variety! Pods are hard as stone too, so much fun to shell. Syrian Fire, a bush bean, gave me almost exactly a pound, just a hair short. That really shocked me as it's a bush bean, and I also gave them a tragically poor spot to grow (what was I thinking??) that is on the shady side. You just never know which beans are going to knock your socks off.

 

[flowerbug]

The beloved Mona Lisa...I realized after the fact that there is crud in this pic, I thought I had picked most of it out but Mona Lisa is one of those beans that holds a small white thread to it's eye when it's shelled. I tried rubbing the beans in batches between my palms to rub them off, but I guess it didn't work and I was rushing. I am pretty thrilled that I got as bean beans as I did though!

beautiful! i call those little bits stickers and some beans have more of them than others. you might influence how many stickers you get if you notice when shelling that some beans come out cleaner than others, set those aside to replant and eat the rest or keep them as backups. eventually you may notice a shift in how many stickers you get.

i've been doing this sort of applying selection pressure for years on many beans i grow to encourage traits i like. for Purple Dove i do it to encourage clean beans with no stickers (and yes it has seemed to help so far) but i also do it for uniform seed size and pods which are narrow. for Molasses Face (aka Yellow Eye) i select for easier shelling (they're hard to shell), for Venda i'm going for easier shelling and straight pods instead of wrinkled and tight holding... etc. just some of my projects. pretty much every bean i grow i am doing something like this.

and since i'm running my fingers on with writing so much i'll say that i'm doing the above while also trying to keep the varieties true to their seed coat and other habits in general. i don't want a new variety name unless i am actually doing something significant like actually getting rid of the rusty eye or getting a notably easier shelling bean or something... when that happens and it is stable enough then it gets a new name (with a reference to how i got it and the work done, etc.)...

ok, enough rambles for the evening... time to zleeps......