First Rice Bean Pod of the Season

[Pulsegleaner]

Harvested the first pod off my rice beans today (NOTE: by "rice beans I mean Vigna umbellata, NOT the small white strain of Phaseolus vulgaris.

I am of two minds about this. On one hand, I'm glad I now have at least ONE pods worth of seed in the bank (with the long time it takes to get them to flower pod and ripen, and our possibly early frosts, seed is never a given)
On the other hand I am also baffled. as you can see this seed has no mottling, and mottled seed is all I planted this year (and I pre scarify and soak all seed, so there is no chance of seed from previous years hiding in the soil.). Moreover this plant is on the RED mottled side of the patch. So, In short I am now even less sure about my ability to predict seed color than I was last year after the "blue seed to red" incident

 

[baymule]

Congrats on getting a pod to seed!!! I got some red mottled bean seeds and planted them. What I grew was solid red. Some times there is just no explaining a bean!

 

[TheSeedObsesser]

Well at least that seed gives you something to work with when it comes to getting a strain or rice bean that isn't so day-length sensitive!

Maybe the color change has to do with growing conditions? Or perhaps it's caused by jumping genes (is that only in corn)?

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Mottled common beans or also rice beans? I ask only because as far as I know no place that sells rice bean for planting sells anything but flat(untmottled) red. To get the rest of the colors, you have to buy it as it comes in bags for eating and sort through them for the few "off colors" . Actually for some of them, you have to buy a LOT of bags, some of the colors are extremely rare (I have, in my life, probably sorted through several TONS of rice beans (and rice beans are the size and weight of rice grains more or less, so you can guess the number of seeds that makes) and I doubt if the number of pinto rice beans I have found has yet topped 60)

Of course, if they are rice beans, you do have the advantage; living in the bottom of Texas, ALL strains probably work for you. Around here the commoner dark burgundy one (the kind you can get out of Baker Creek, in the Chinese part of the Explorer series) are hopeless, they are far too long season. So I have to wait for the tiny opening around the later winter early spring when the crop of the OTHER kind (bigger, duller, lighter shade of red) comes in. I'd be getting them anyway (that's where most of my non-red adzuki supply comes from too, as well as my oh-so precious wild soybeans.) But it's nice to be able to grow some of the rice beans as well, and hope that someday, I can get a strain that will mature early enough I won't have to keep planting from the founder stock, and that it will have all the colors (ironically, the "wrong kind" is now rather sparse in other colors. You can get white, a little black and a smattering of pinto, but the mottled have all but disappeared. Pretty soon, that stuff will only be of use to me for the weeds.)

 

[Pulsegleaner]

No beans don't have transposons like that (at least I don't think they do).

Ditto on the conditions. I HAVE gotten mottled before, last year (it was only one or two plants, but given the accident, it was surprising I got those). I just assume that, since rice beans mostly pollinate themselves I should get back what I had before.

Most likely this plant just had a little gene break that tuned off its pigment (so it's a red mottled with non function red). Every now and again, I get a bean plant that is albino so they do break down from time to time. Heck one of the reasons I didn't plant any white no mottle is that a lot of them turn out to be reds with defective expression.

 

[baymule]

The beans I planted were regular beans, not rice beans. And you are right, things just take off and GROW here! This climate makes me look like I know what I am doing.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Then rice beans are DEFINTELY not for you. Here, where they struggle, I still wind up with massive snarls of vine by years end. It's so bad that at harvest, I just classify seed by color because I could not tell where one plant ends and the next begins if you held a loaded gun to my head (right by one patch, there is a tiny stand of adzukis and the two are by now so intermingled that the only reason I know some of them are reproducing is that adzukis have much shorter flower groups (they make groups of ones and twos not tens and twelves.) In a place like YOU have, where it is probably warm enough for them to behave almost perennially, they'd turn into an all devouring plague, practically kudzu with yellow flowers (If you got flowers, in rich soil (like you presumably have if you land is so fecund) they often will just make leaves, after leaves after leaves.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

So that you can get some idea of the ratios, here is a picture of the "take" from today's rice bean hunt (the part of what I get that actually gets saved for planting)

The left box contains what came out of the bins (i.e. the stuff where I actually have some ability to sort through and skew in favor for the stuff I want) as it looks currently (i.e during the season when the type in the bins are the "wrong" type) Didn't get any receipts but that is from roughly 2-3 lbs.
The right box contains the findings from four bags (three lbs.) of the Wah Po brand (currently the only brand I can find that has a mix that still has a decent amount of mottled beans).
And for the sake of completeness, below is a picture of everything ELSE I got out of them

In this case, the left box contains the finds from BOTH the rice beans sources (bin top, bags bottom) They are really getting better about the purity (light years better than it was when I started searching rice beans). Bad for me, but I suppose, good for the majority of buyers (i.e. the ones who are planning to eat them)
The right box contains the finds from the bins of mung beans, which are still somewhat more in quantity. Though since all of the finds here are simply alternate colors of either the mungs themselves or other commonly farmed legumes, that probably has little significance food wise. On the other hand since the stores that these bins are in are Chinese Herb shops; the people here may thing of what they buy more as medicine, if the herbalist was told someone that they should eat more mungs and AVOID all adzuki beans and cowpeas, there might be an issue. Not that I know of such a prescription, or even if this kind of stuff really falls into the "herbalist would make it up for you category". The line in Chinese culture between what is food and what is medicine is blurry to almost nonexistent. When I get in line to pay I notice most of the Chinese people are buying things like peanuts, watermelon seeds and candied mei plums, and I am fairly sure these are less "medicine" and more "snacks"

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Well, Pod #2 is in, and THIS one looks correct

BTW after this I'll probably just show the seeds themselves, rather than the empty pod too. All the pods look the same in what I have (i.e. at this time I have no beans with purple or streaked pods) Plus trying to take the pod in too is proving a little risky. I almost lost a seed this time, and I can ill afford that It turns out that, while domestic rice bean pods don't actually shatter of their own accord, they ARE on a sufficient "tripwire" that the least touch on a ripe pod WILL make them pop. So if I keep trying to take the whole pod in intact, I am more or less guaranteed to have most of my seed go flying.

And as a little bonus, This guy showed up in the front flower garden. Obviously it is from one of the times I tossed spare red seed out for the birds. At this point in the year, the odds of this one making mature pods before frost is remote, But I post it here to demonstrate something I have said before; that, when the season is right, rice bean plants can flower at ABSURDLEY small sizes.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

And pod #3; found this morning. First from the OTHER cluster, so the first cream with mottled I've ever gotten from my own patch. This one was picked very slightly younger than the last two so it isn't totally dried down in the picture.

Read more: http://alanbishop.proboards.com/thread/8095/first-rice-bean-pod-season?page=1#ixzz3Dc1mcXd6