Two pieces of news
1.As of this morning, the last of the adzuki bean pods are harvested and drying. All of the one's I planted were and still are more or less the same color, so I don't really see a point in doing more pictures. 3-10 seeds total from each plant (maybe next year when I plant them in a safer place, I'll get better numbers (though the very nature of how adzukis reproduce means that getting more than a tiny number of plants that can hold their own production wise against the rice beans is probably pretty remote. I really DO think these ones are probably all green manure/fodder species, where their value to the farmers using them is in their green biomass, not their seed production.
2 More importantly, I will actually be able to keep going with the experiments. With the still quite high rate of non-producers (seeds that don't grow, or grow but don't flower) and the sheer difficulty of finding material, I never really have enough seed to be really "safe" or stable, and getting more is always uncertain. But Today, luck returned. I was over at my local branch of H-mart, and not only did they have bags of rice beans (they usually don't; it's not a big crop in Korean circles) but the brand they had ACTUALLY had off adzukis. It probably wont be enough to give me oodles of seed (it never is) and likely won't last long term (in my experience, the companies that pack the "right" kind of rice beans for my need only do so when the can't get the "wrong" kind, and, as soon as the "wrong" king become in season again, they switch back.) But it will probably buy me another year. Plus it re-stablazes my supply of the rice beans themselves (remember, I'm fairy sure that these, and only these, are short enough season to actually produce up here, so if they ever disappear permanently (if production/demand of the others ever got to the point where enough could be grown of them to cover the whole of the export market year round, I think they might) there goes any ability of me to supplement what I can grow myself.
The mix in these seeme to be similar to the old version I saw three or so years ago, in that it actually has a fair amount of RED adzukis as well as the other colors (the stuff last year and from the bin didn't; the off colors were all the adzukis there were in there. Same tenecies as last year though, less and less mottled and black, more and more tan, cream, and green (in fact there seems to be quite a lot of cream and green this year) still a small number of extra tiny mottled mung beans too. I even found a wild soybean this time (couple more years and I may have enough to be able to risk planting them!).
As for the rice beans themselves usual mix for the type. There may be less mottled than last time, but that seems to be the trend now
