Pulsegleaner
Garden Master
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2014
- Messages
- 3,549
- Reaction score
- 6,977
- Points
- 306
- Location
- Lower Hudson Valley, New York
As I understand it, the difficulty of getting machines through fields of pole beans is part of the reason why they aren't grown as a commercial (green bean) crop.
I have no proof of it beyond my own speculation, but I have often wondered if similar motivations affected a much older issue, why the vast majority of field grown legume crops are generally overwhelmingly bush types, when, in most cases thier ancestors are nearly all vines.,hat is, why bush tends to be selected over vine. Soybeans would be a good example. Glycine soja is an indeterminate vine (I've grown it). But nearly all Glycine max are free standing bush type beans (there ARE such things as climbing soybeans, but they are uncommon, even more so if you are keeping it to cultivars grown for people to eat.) I tend to thing the motivation had to do with field cropping. For things you are mostly growing in small home plot situations, climbing is OK; putting up a few trellises is no big deal. But for a mass field crop, going pole means either setting up hundreds of supports (and training the vines onto them) or having to harvest the crop all at once and do a massive winnowing project at the end. That works OK for some legumes, like lentils and the small seeded vignas (like mungs and adukis) but those tend to be harder seeded and more resiliant of harsh threshing. I actually beleive the the main reason we still HAVE pole beans has a lot to do with the whole "three sisters" planting method; the cornstalks meant you ALREADY had supports for the beans. If domestic corn was a plant that was built more along the lines of wheat or barley (where the plant stalk was pretty thin and easy to snap under pressure) I think we would be looking at a race of beans that was nearly all bush.