Mr. Bean

[Blue-Jay]

PXBT is the strangest variety! I believe it is the result of several ancestral crosses between subspecies. It obviously has purple pod ancestry in it that does not show in the pods but in the leaves and stems. I can tell it has the very small bush subspecies in its ancestry too, the same subspecies as Little Brown Cat, and there is in it something of Appalachian beans too. I grew them well but got very little production. Some plants just...died...that thinned the patch out. It also I hope gives a better natural selection for my conditions. I got a third of a can plus an envelope of seeds from the best 2 plants, one the prettiest seeds, the other the nicest plant. Small plants that lean over nicely. Definitely not any kind of commercial variety, but REALLY COOL to grow! Mostly pretty deep lavender-pink flowers that show themselves off. Ya know, these plants can work in a flower bed somewhere toward the front. The foliage is also pretty. PXBT is only part of the name, but lol, kinda hard for the ole neanderthal to remember all the numbers and hyphens. I wonder if it stands for...

???Purple crossed with Black Turtle or something??? PXBT. Just that name got me!

And the outcrosses I got! Those will be another story!

Hey @marshallsmyth,

I too have always wondered what that PXBT number on that bean meant. The full number is PXBT-PP-97B-OOH. I still don't know what it meant, but this past summer in 2015 I found out where it came from. I got a hold of the of the SSE member the late Robert Lobitz's last of his legacy beans that he was working on before he passed away in 2006. Another SSE member in Kansas was working with these beans for about 5 years as he got a bunch of samples from his brother James Lobitz in Minnesota, but the Kansas SSE member became frustrated with them as they seemed to him to always keep segregating every season. He just packed his Lobitz legacy bean harvests in his freezer and forgot about them. I knew he had these beans from a conversation I had with him at a SSE Conference/Campout about 3 years ago. Well I asked this SSE member if I could have a go at them and he sent them to me along with a print out of Robert Lobitz's entire bean collection that Robert had collected from various places including other SSE members. There was also included another list of all the named beans that R. Lobitz had introduced (probably mostly through SSE) as he was a member. Also a third list of unnamed beans that had just numbers. On this list There are several PXBT number combinations including this exact one (PXBT-PP-97B-OOH) that we have been growing. Robert apparently assigned some type of number when he found new outcrosses in his grow outs. What the numbers actually mean only he knew. There are numbers within these numbers that to me appear to be possibly the year he first discovered the new outcross. I'm sure after he grew out the bean enough times to see it stablize he then named the bean. This PXBT number is a bean he never got around to naming.

Anyway I grew out all these Lobitz legacy samples that this SSE member sent me this past spring of 2015 and this season I saw very little segregating. Every one of these legacy beans has a number on it in the style that Robert Lobitz used. I'll continue to keep track of them with their numbers. I split the samples with a fellow in Kentucky that I got to know from him discovering my website. He is now a first year college student and he wants to be a bean breeder. His parents were plant breeders for the Cargill seed and grain company. So if these beans do stablilze he and I will have the honor of naming the last of the Robert Lobitz legacy of beans.

The meaning of the number Marshall? PXBT-PP-97B-OOH I wonder if the P is Provider times Black Turtle. PP is a mystery to me. 97B I wonder if he discovered the outcross in 1997 and B=Black Turtle was the seed mother. OOH is another mystery. Speculation is fun and I wonder how far off we really are.