The 2014 Little Easy Bean Network - Get New Beans On The Cheap

[baymule]

I still have green beans and butterbeans producing. Planted them in mid April and nothing but a hard frost will take them out.

 

[Rhodie Ranch]

my beans are producing too, and we're not expected to get a frost until dec or jan. maybe....

 

[897tgigvib]

Hasn't frosted at my garden yet, but lots of nearby places have gotten a light frost. My garden is in a well moderated micro climate with the lake so close. It's been 42 degrees several nights. Probably won't have a serious frost until after or around Thanksgiving. Some of the beans are still making a few pods. Choctaw is being especially nice and so is one of the Ringwood outcross plants, and 2 of the Junin outcross plants. The Junin outcross with white seeds is making nice snap type pods that remind me more and more of Tendergreen's pods. I think I got the last of White Coco African's pods. The Limas I took all of them out. Yes, there will be some to cook up of them, especially of the North Pole and North Star varieties, both of which second cropped.

Oh! While taking out the Limas, I found one of Mar 's Puerto Rican Lima bean plants trying to grow. I'll try to Perennialize it! Maybe if successful it'll produce next year. Got to make some kind of CLOTCH for it.

 

[Blue-Jay]

I think it's time to start my little bean fashion show for the year. Instead of putting all the new outcrosses and or segregations on all at one time and having one giant feast of color sort of like Christmas (come and gone in one day). I thought I would deal this out in pieces every day or so and make the fun last a little longer.

So the photo on the left of the photo panel is a bean I found segregating from White Robin in 2012. I called it Purple Trout for obvious reasons it looks like Jacob's Cattle (AKA Trout) and the bean is dark purple in color. I grew it again last year and got a better count on seed. Grew it again this year and found another bean growing among it (second Photo in the middle of the panel) that appears to be just like a bean I had back in the 1980's called Holstein. What I like about this bean is the fact the dark coloring is jet black. No purple or hint of blue, and I compared the seed of both of these beans in the bright sunlight and with a bright flashlight. As I was shelling Purple Trout last month the darker color of the black one caught my eye immediately. All the trout patterned beans that I've seen and they even have the name Black Trout or Black and White Trout. The colored area on these varieties are not a true black but a dark purple. So that is why I'm a bit excited to see a true jet black color back into this seed coat pattern. You can go to my website and see Holstein on the Outcrosses page. I think the white area on this bean will with further growing open up more and there will be a better contrast and ratio of white to black. This happened on another one of my original beans called Pawnee. Pawnee was about 99% brown when I first saw it's seeds in late summer of 1979. With continued growing and selecting the white area increased until the bean looks like what it does today. I am going to give this black and white bean the name designation once again of Holstein.

I had sent out seed samples of Holstein in the 80's to some members of Seed Savers Exchange and about two years ago I did a search on the online SSE Yearbook history for Holstein and found that someone in the 90's (during my 22 years of falling off the gardening wagon) had listed Holstein one time in the SSE yearbook. There was a comments tab of that members description I could click on and the member had stated. "This is one of the most beautiful beans you ever could hope to see I will send you some. Send you some meaning he was going to turn the bean into SSE's Heritage Farm to be included in the collection but that eventuality never came about.

The third photo on the right side of the photo panel is a rather mundane brown looking bean that I also discovered growing in the Purple Trout planting this year.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Two questions I am hoping the board can give me help on

First do these look like lima beans to you?

Both came from my hunts among the legume bins of Chinatown. I can (and of course will) plant them in the spring to see but advance guesswork could maximize my chances. They certainly LOOK like small limas (both are about 1cm long) to me. But it occurs to me that a really short flattened common bean would look more or less the same, and common beans of both those coat colors show up fairly frequently in the searches. I've made misidentifications before (like the time when it took me a couple months to realized that the unidentified "wild legume" I had found in one of my searches was simply a very small black cowpea with an unusually strong expression of the "crowder" trait) Is there some feature of lima bean seeds that allows for easy differentiation from common beans BESIDES the flattened shape?

Second, is Molley's Zebra ACTUALLY African of origin? I know it was among the seeds offered with the African material at the beginning of the swap, but I have also seen that particular bean listed on some other sites online, and not all of them say it comes from Africa (I think some said Germany, and some said other things). I ask because while sorting through the pile of Mottled Grey I recently bought for the Final Plan, I found two beans in the packets* that, while they don't look anything like the "normal" Mottled Greys look a lot like Molly's at least in seed coat pattern (never having grown MZ I don't know about size. These two seeds are also both about 1cm long)

Since we don't know if all of the seeds in the African stuff were collected in South Africa itself (they probably weren't given some of the names) I don't think it at all improbable for MZ to be growing around Uganda as well.

Oh and marshall, re your lima did you mean you need a "cloche"?

*Actually there are at least 20 or so beans that are different enough in appearance that they are probably NOT parts of the Mottled Grey landrace. But the others are mostly too nondescript to hazard a guess as to strain.

 

[journey11]

@Pulsegleaner , I grew out the Molley's Zebra for Russ this year. They are actually from Australia. Handed down from Hal, I think.

And to add to the confusion, there is also a Molly's Zebra out there (no 'e') that is a runner bean.

Hal tells me also that they are similar to what we have called Rattlesnake beans here.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Ok, so this is probably something different. Ok I'll get back to you all in three years and tell you what came out of planting it.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Molley's Zebra is a bean raised by an Australian fellow by the name of Bill Mollison. Another Australian fellow who spends part of the year in South Africa and part of the year in Australia sent it to me last year along with many other beans some of which were collected in Africa.

Judging by the photo it doesn't appear that those two small beans are limas more like P. Vulgaris. Can you detect any fine radiating lines across the seed coat coming from the eye area of the seed? This is one of the characteristics of lima seed. Those radiating lines are I think easier to detect when the seed is new.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

The red one has the lines; the black one doesn't. Though that doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't have them too; black covers all. (remember the black black eyed peas?)

Actually I turned the black one around in the light and it DOES have radiating lines as well.

 

[897tgigvib]

I think they are butterbean limas, of the same subspecies of lima as horn's speckled. I'm noticing that limas seem to have 2 subspecies at least.

Smaller chunkier lima seeds in one group, and bigger to full sized lima beans in the other group. Course, I kind of think that group of bigger limas can be divided again into at least 2 groups; Real big with big thick pods, and not as big with smaller pods.

All this is just guessing. I wonder how close these guesses are.