A Seed Saver's Garden

[heirloomgal]

Having some difficulties with my device as of late, and while fiddling around with it, found some photos stored in an app that I didn't realize I had in there. Mostly tomato & peppers pictures from the last few years, though not from
this year. Thought I'd post 'em in a big photo dump.

Black Habanero

Piazinho

White Habanero

Aji Dulce

Trinidad Perfume

Chinese 5 Pepper

Some tomatoes...

Cosmic Eclipse

Thai Pink Egg

Lucky Tiger

Blass

 

[heirloomgal]

Few more tomatoes. Not sure why the pictures are mega huge, something in the transfer of data I assume.

Oud Holland

Dwarf Mahogany - Cross Hemisphere Dwarf Tomato Project variety

Primary Colours

Helsing Junction Blues

Dark Orange Muscat

Great White

Gold Rush Currant

Sabelka

Blue Gold

Blush Tiger

 

[Zeedman]

Thank you! They are nearly all ready to be cut & hung then. So much rain, its nuts.

Rodents. Ugh. Went to harvest the near ready crop of sesame pods in my greenhouse, and the stems were totally stripped. NO pods. Like there was never pods on those stems, ever. Not even a trace of chewed pod matter. Mice.

Rodents stripped one of my soybeans this year too. Just like you described; the plants loaded with pods several weeks ago - now, no sign on the stems that pods were ever there. I did find a pile of skins under the plants though... and another pile in the garage, where they are probably stashing the beans. It was one of the larger-seeded varieties ("Grande"), I had planted a long row in hope of using some as edamame. Fortunately not a total loss, since some pod clusters were held above the leaf canopy & those were untouched.

 

[heirloomgal]

There were 2 bean 'trees' I had planted in an area that did not end up receiving enough sunlight. The shade being thrown there is from an increasingly large pine tree which grows exponentially each year, and its' annual increased shade was more than I anticipated. Thus, those 2 did EXTREMELY poorly. However, I still got something from those varieties - enough to try again (barely). With one, Nebraska Beauty, I literally had one seed left. The other, Croatian Monstrance, I had very few and have no idea why I placed these two 'at risk of losing' beans there. At the end of spring planting I tend to get worn out a bit, including the neurological faculties I guess Croatian Monstrance is not available in Canada anywhere (I got it in a trade) so now I'm kicking myself, hard, for making such a dumb move. I REALLY wanted that bean! But onwards and upwards, and from the one come many so - better real estate allotment for them next year.

As for the tree, I would LOVE to chainsaw that thing. I have no mixed feeling about chopping trees down, especially pine varieties, especially in my yard. It's just so towering at this point it would really cost to bring it down safely. But it's my next wish for the garden. Need DH on board for that, the tricky part. If there was a chainsaw emoji, I'd insert it here. ☺

Here's 'Nebraska Beauty' -

Here's some beans that did okay. 'Dr. Wyche's' was supposed to be a bush, but was a semi runner ( pet peeve!) It came in several seed coats, all kinds of colours. For some reason, only the burgundy seeds came through.

Dr. Wyche

Giele Waldbeantsje

Here's one I really like, 'Yoeme Pastel Eye'. The swirl is beige, not white, so the contrast against the pink/light lavender is a bit muddy, but it was productive. I do find it visually unique. I will try to get a better picture in the future.

 

[heirloomgal]

The season is definitely coming to an end. Today's weather, though, was beyond wonderful, at 18 degrees. Hasn't been this nice in awhile. No rain, just pure warmth and sunshine. Felt great to be working outside and beginning the job of cleaning up the garden, removing spent plants, stakes and just general tidying up. Things get pretty jungle-y. My daughter & I planted 57 new flower bulbs today too - crocus', a very unusual daffodil assortment (including 'Petit Fours' which is pink and white and looks like its namesake pastry!), some reddish diminutive allium flowers ('Drumsticks'), parrot tulips and a bicoloured purple and white variety. All for cutflowers in spring. I was temporarily distracted talking to a neighbour at the start, and she started the project without me (which began with some weeding) and by the time I joined her she had the whole bed drawn up in a perfectly measured and spaced grid pattern, and had found the bulb digger and the level. I couldn't quite believe my eyes. Pretty soon this little grasshopper will be teaching me some stuff. and

Managed to clean up a pepper & semi-runner bean/bush bean bed. Hard to believe it's done for 2021.

Went looking around for any peppers or tomatoes that might be left or barely hanging on. Not much at this point. Sorting through the greenhouse plants is next.

What's left of my currant tomato. Still lots of seeds to collect. So many things to do, and all are time sensitive. They still taste great, even after all these really cold nights.

Really like the pods of 'Alubias di Tolusa'. The forming pods stand out from the others. I find they look almost like necklaces or beads, something evocative in those perfectly aligned bumps. 'Til I stripped them I hadn't noticed that this quality was so prominent.

'Schneebohne' a.k.a. 'Snow Bean' maturing in the vertical position. The one birch tree trunk that broke. Was sheer luck that there were cages right beside to fall on. I think it will be just fine after all. I also grew 'Ferris Heirloom' this year, which looked very similar to me, but after growing them both out I see that they are different. Schneebohne is noticeably smaller, more speckled with pastel pink and the dry pod colour is a bit different. Ferris Heirloom does originate in Europe too though so maybe they have related histories. I've not seen any other beans like these two.

'Tarahumara' pods moving toward maturity. Bit of shade here, so slower than the rest. One thing I didn't anticipate using tree trunks for pole beans is how the bean vines on other poles would hop over, as they are here. Luckily, most of them are easy to tell apart even if a vine jumps ship. The tomatillos blooming here refuse to croak.

Fall means pumpkins! The packet the seeds came in read 'Livingston's Pie Squash'. According to some sites (which I had believed) these are the same variety as 'Winter Luxury', but they aren't. Maybe there is another 'Livingstone's Pie' that is the same, but not this one. I've grown Winter Luxury before, and it has a very visible fine white netting on the surface, these have none of that. The flesh is very similar as well as the size, same long handle too, but these are more productive and a bit smaller. I like it despite it not being what I had envisioned. For the little space I gave them, II'll be able to make a lot of pies.

My favourite one. I like the long handles.

 

[heirloomgal]

Today I started to shell my 'Grandma Gina's' pole bean. I LOVE this variety. I had several pods that had dried inside the house, though there were many (most) still left out on the tree/pole. I had started picking off pods that seemed close to drying to finish them off indoors. These were some seriously large pods. When I started cracking pods I was ASTONISHED to see that nearly every one of them had sprouted. I've never seen ANYTHING like this before. I had been so careful to watch them daily and check for any pod that was just barely mature enough to pull off.

So, I went outside to my tree with the rest of the pods still hanging on. Most of these were still quite soft to the to touch, and some were still somewhat green even. I started opening immature pods on different parts of the tree. All sprouted.
YIKES! This was a precious one that I got in a trade (thanks @Artorius!) and had only a few seeds to start with. I couldn't believe that so many were split, and yet were so far from being dry. I really had no choice but to shell every pod, as immature as many of them were, to try to save any that might not have sprouted yet. If they were ready to sprout before the bean was even fully mature, than I guess that I could shell them immature and hope for the best.

This is the box of bean seeds I had when I was done (3 plants) -

My guess was that more than half were sprouted.

I sorted them out into #1 not split, #2 hopelessly immature but not split and #3 totally split.

#1

#2

#3

This photo was taken at the end of the day, after they had dried out a bit, so the skins started wrinkling on them. (While shelling the skins were mostly coming off.) The good news is that it looks like some seeds will be viable, but of poor quality as I shelled them too early. They are probably nearly double the size they should be dried. I hope that the good ones manage to dry without problems. This is another variety that is not available in Canada, so if I lose it...... At least I got around to shelling the pods today, to be able see how bad the situation was so that I could rescue what was out there. Silver lining.

I'm not sure what to attribute this splitting to. On the one hand we have had our share of rains, and that probably factored in, but none of my other bean varieties did this. Of the many 'Piekny Jas' beans I've shelled (comparable in its' large size) maybe 5 or 6 of close to 100 had sprouted in the shell. And it was never a whole shell, just the odd seed in a pod.

Here is a picture of a pod being shelled, it's a bit immature, but it shows just how fleshy and moist these pods are. It was like a layer of thick, wet fibre slush against the bean. I think this variety may have a built in weakness because of this pod characteristic. I'm not sure, but I wonder. It is a romano type - which are delicious - and the texture of romanos is much less fibrous than the pencil or filet types. I find them to have a mushroom texture more than a 'bean' texture. Perhaps the downside of that less fibrous quality is this layer of soft, moist 'bean slush' in the pod. The quaity that makes them delicious to me, also makes them difficult to save seed from? Does anyone have experience with this variety? Is this just a freak incident due to rain?

 

[flowerbug]

Today I started to shell my 'Grandma Gina's' pole bean. I LOVE this variety. I had several pods that had dried inside the house, though there were many (most) still left out on the tree/pole. I had started picking off pods that seemed close to drying to finish them off indoors. These were some seriously large pods. When I started cracking pods I was ASTONISHED to see that nearly every one of them had sprouted. I've never seen ANYTHING like this before. I had been so careful to watch them daily and check for any pod that was just barely mature enough to pull off. [...]

you are saying those are sprouted, but i think they just did not finish forming. i see beans like that some years on some varieties. they are edible and some may even be viable, but they are not really finished.

if they were sprouting you'd see roots and, well, sprouts...

 

[Ridgerunner]

I don't know that #2 is hopelessly immature. You might try a germination test to see how they sprout.

I have one I'm trying to develop (Miss T) that acts like your #3. It's not that they sprout, just that they split. I tossed over half of them this year. I don't think they are immature, maybe the opposite. The skin splits and the seed itself separates. It is very variety specific and is a fairly large bean. I can see some of yours that the seed has separated.

It's always worth a photo. These behaved themselves but the Miss T's have always had this problem to a certain degree. I think it was made worse this year because of how wet it was.

 

[heirloomgal]

you are saying those are sprouted, but i think they just did not finish forming. i see beans like that some years on some varieties. they are edible and some may even be viable, but they are not really finished.

if they were sprouting you'd see roots and, well, sprouts...

Sorry, poor choice of words on my part. I guess I should have said the seeds were germinating in their pods. The seed coats in pic #3 are all split open from the seed imbibing so much water, and swelling. The next step is to send out a sprout, but it hadn't progressed quite that far though it would have. But the seeds with split seedcoats were definitely ruined, no question about it. In fact, many of them were no longer a single bean seed, but two halves that would fall apart without the seedcoat. Totally rubbery, and wrecked. The last photo of the green pod with immature beans in it, I posted not to show sprouting (they hadn't) but to show the thick layer of wet slush the beans sit in while 'drying down'. No wonder they are prone to sprouting! This is what they looked like when I peeled the split seedcoat off the bean seeds -

This was the DRIED pod -

At least it was 50- 50 for good vs. wrecked seed. Good news though, the vast majority of my shelled seeds that did not have split seedcoats look like they will mature just fine. No sign of wrinkling, or shabby seedcoats despite not drying down in the pod. And there is still a goodly amount of seeds there to try again.

 

[heirloomgal]

I don't know that #2 is hopelessly immature. You might try a germination test to see how they sprout.

I have one I'm trying to develop (Miss T) that acts like your #3. It's not that they sprout, just that they split. I tossed over half of them this year. I don't think they are immature, maybe the opposite. The skin splits and the seed itself separates. It is very variety specific and is a fairly large bean. I can see some of yours that the seed has separated.

It's always worth a photo. These behaved themselves but the Miss T's have always had this problem to a certain degree. I think it was made worse this year because of how wet it was.

View attachment 44080

@Ridgerunner I did a wee bit of research/digging around to see what might account for this phenomenon. I came across some interesting stuff in regards to this tendency in certain beans.

The seed coats themselves may have an sufficient amount of controlling hormones like 'abscisic acid' and 'gibberellic acid' - possibly due to being bred into insufficiency. This 'in pod' sprouting tendency is (can be) tied to something in agriculture they call 'domestication syndrome'. By selecting those certain (eating ) qualities we want in beans, we select out other characteristics - like those that might inhibit seedcoats/seeds swelling with water in the pod. In cooking we like that beans swell, cook up tender and skins that aren't tough. Potentially problematic for the seeds though. Also we like that they sprout simply by adding water to them, a feature less existent in wild beans - where temperature fluctuations tend to be the signalling factor. Our domestic seeds are selected for germination triggered by water as opposed to temperature, increasing this sprouting vulnerability. Curiously, increased seed size is part of what we've selected for in domestic beans and this too is tied to domestication syndrome re: pod sprouting. Permeability of the seed coat, changes in the dormancy tendencies/loss of germination inhibition, selecting against 'seed hardness' all points to my Grandma Gina's seeds sprouting in the pods. In the case of this variety, given that the pods have been bred to be just so enormous, I suspect some of that selecting is working against potential for mature seed formation. Romano type beans in general I would think are more prone to problems in this regard, given their uniquely fleshy quality.

All the stuff that plays a decisive role in seed germination timing by regulating water uptake has been messed with, in a nutshell. I do wonder if I had planted this bean in a less loamy, water retentive soil would there be a difference. Next year it'll go in the sandier soil garden, and I'll cut the vines from the ground very early. I'll have the knowledge now to be preemptive. Because aside from this problem, I think these would make fantastic eating beans. I hope you're right that my #2 beans will sprout