First Rice Bean Pod of the Season

[TheSeedObsesser]

Well at least you're getting a reasonable amount of seed, enough to continue your non-daylight-sensitive rice bean project. They're pretty neat looking, hard to imagine their size (I see that you have them in bead boxes).

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Actually, I think they are designed for some sewing item. I pick then up a Jo-Ann's (craft store) and they aren't kept anywhere near the bead section (next time I get one I'll look at the label before I peel it off). I find them handy to take with me into the city (the double sided design means I can get a lot of sections to sort into in a fairly compact space (and unlike the actual bead boxes I was using before, they are less hard plastic, so they don't shatter)

A rice bean seed is about the size of a rice grain, that's why they call them rice beans (well that and because they are traditionally often grown in drained rice paddies over the fallow season. And the pods are about as long as the last two joints of your middle finger (well the last two joints of MY middle finger).

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Pod #4 harvested today. Seed is more or less identical in appearance to #3, so I won't bother with a picture
About the only notable thing about this pod is the nature of the plant it came from. It actually seems to be one of the pseudo-gracilis. Rice beans officially come in five recognized subspecies, with gracilis being usually designated as the "wild" subspecies (much as nakashime is for the adzuki bean). Surprisingly examples of what appears to be several to all of these subspecies show up in the plating, so the farmers must sometimes used a cocktail (or far more likely since my seed stock comes bags being sold for food, the packers/exporters pool crop from many, many farmers all over China , who are growing a great diversity of types, and the "good" and "bad" times have more to do with various types coming into season at different times than any specific region (I've seen abundant evidence that at lest some exporters mix types together that would have had to come from very different sections of the country)
The pseudo-gracilis is my term for the smallest of the types. Actually it may really be gracilis but not having ever seen a verified specimen I am hesitant to make that call. Unlike the others, the G type never really puts any girth on as it grows. By the time they reproduce most of the others have thickened greatly (in some cases, to something around the diameter of a pencil) The G type are basically the same thickness as adult plants as they were as seedlings,about that of a strand of capellini (angel hair pasta). The G's are also the only ones that are pretty much FULL climbers. As I have mentioned most of the rice beans are somewhere between partial runners and full on bush. But even the climbers usually go up on their own a little bit before making vines and have some branching. The G type however basically always flops over immediately. In fact if planted on it's own, I rather doubt they would survive well, since they seem to also grow unusually slowly . Sandwiched in between the normal type, they can intertwine, but I've yet to see one make it to the pole (about two inches).
But the point I am trying to get at is that usually, the G-types don't flower here, or flower and pod very poorly. In fact, I found this one while I was removing G type vines (because the lash the other plants together they can make separation at harvest time difficult. I probably will keep doing this (at this point in the year, a plant that has yet to even flower is probably incapable of making mature seed before the freeze comes) But I will go a little slower, and leave the few that actually did make pods alone. Probably keep their seed separate though.
Actually this does bring up questions of what will happen when I plant the section of my box reserved for "wild type" rice beans; ones that are only 1/2 to 1/3 the size of the "normal ones" (somewhat tellingly the vast majority of the are also cream or tan with heavy mottle, so this one might be a wild that got in by accident) I think I may have to stick the pole in the dead center of the seedlings, or plant around the pole, which I normally don't do (I prefer to wait and see where the plants are twisting to, then place the pole accordingly.)

 

[baymule]

Those beans are tiny! You are getting a good harvest this year. I like the bin boxes you are storing them in, I could use something like that for a lot of my seeds. That's a great idea!

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Oh no, those aren't the storage boxes. Those are the SORTING boxes, the ones I keep in my backpack so I can start sorting before I get home. But they don't have enough spaces to do all the long term divisions (plus of course I have to have them empty when I go back in each week.) The STORAGE box is a lot bigger. It's the kind people use for storing embroidery floss so I have 24 divisions. And the flat cream tan isn't even in that, there's so much by now I keep it in a spherical glass jar with a screwtop which originally contained honey (much as my larger bindweed container originally had pine syrup)

My seeds are in all kinds of containers. There are probably two or three dozen of those honey jars (there'd be more, if I could still get that honey, I really liked it) Some of the small stuff is in stackable screwtops designed for pills. There are hundreds of envelopes both professional and mine paper and Ziploc. I have a box of metal cylinders (formerly filled with tea) waiting for when I need them. Quite a lot of the stuff is in tissue vials (little glass screwtop things, like you use in medical labs) especially stuff I don't like to handle (like the rosary peas).

So far the harvest is pretty much as it was previous years, a smattering of pods. The only difference is that this year I'm resisting the urge I get around now to pick everything before the frost, thereby ruining much of the crop.

And "good" is relative. At the moment, I have around 20 seeds from this year. Objectively that would be fine and the ones I hopefully will get down the road a bonus. But the rice beans get just as much ravaging by the critters as everything else. In fact probably more, because they sprout so early. The only way around that is to plant by the handful and count on the critters missing some. For each seed that makes it all the way to making seed of it's own, I have to put in something on the order of 1-2 hundred start seeds. Though that number will probably drop at some point (if only because once I start planting my own it will presumably be all growers (as opposed to now when there is a large percentage of non-reproducible seed in the mix no matter what. But even then I'll need a LOT of start seed. At the moment I'm still just banking what I get (my own seed gets stored, and I plant with fresh bought seed each year) At some point I'll start using my own. In fact at some point I'll probably HAVE to if I want the alternate colors, since each year it seems the percentage of beans that are NOT un-mottled red goes down by about 3/4 to 7/8ths. Whether this is due to more rouging in the breeding pool or better weed removal tech (if they are using the kind that uses an electric eye to mark seed to be removed, like seed labs do, I imagine it may also reject any non-standard color material.) But it is. I don't have a QUARTER of the amount of accumulated found seed I had at this point last year.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Pods #5,6 and 7 in (three pods, two plants). All seem to be white. Pod #5 is from the white mottled side, so it looks like there is a no-mottle in there as well Makes me wonder if, as the season progesses I'm going to start getting red no mottleds (i.e. "normal") out of the red side.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Makes me wonder if, as the season progesses I'm going to start getting red no mottleds (i.e. "normal") out of the red side.

And the answer is, YES! Pod #8 is flat red (#9 is white again, I think that the one or two white seed plants on the red side must be very strong producers)

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Just went out again, and found pods #10-#15, appx. (now that they are really coming in it's hard to remember how many pods I have picked. I'm usually focusing on making sure that seed from different plants goes in different pockets, so I can keep it discrete).
Only odd thing is that except for one pod that was red no mottled again which was no surprise, as it was a twin pod to the last one (same pod cluster) they're ALL white no mottle. Looks like mottle is even more recessive than I thought (unless there are three or four mottled less plants in each cluster and they are so fecund they are producing 80-90% of the pods. I'd say I might be picking too early but 1. the seed isn't shriveling (which it does if it is immature) and 2. I know from last year that rice beans with a red base start coloring up LONG before the seed fills the pod.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Finally, a few more pods with mottled seed (red) By now we are probably on pod #50 or so. Each day now, I go out and collect the 4 ripest clusters of pods, 4 usually being the maximum number of pockets I have available to keep the pods separate until I can shell (the pods tend to be created and fertilized in spurts, so if one pod in a cluster is ripe, the rest in that cluster are usually ripe enough to pick as well. Plus doing it by cluster makes it easier to keep beans from the same cluster together, since keeping ones from the same plant is hopeless currently). This is a different plant that the last red mottled on. The mottle is lighter and in any case this one was on white side I think (I don't think I took any pods from red side today) I also don't think there were any I had to stoop for, so this one probably made it up the pole. On the other hand the cluster was only 2 pods which still gives some support to my theory that the mottled don't reproduce as heavily as the unmottled (or possibly why the amount I find in my searches keeps seeming to go down each season).

 

[Pulsegleaner]

And today there was a white with mottled......on the RED side.