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

[897tgigvib]

I love that description, apathetic poles.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I wonder if that is the same thing as what I refer to as "conditional" poles; beans which seem to make their decision on whether to be bush or pole based on their immediate environment (stay bush if separated from any support, but turn into climbers if a climbing strata is available.)

 

[Blue-Jay]

Another term for those beans that just lay on the ground and sprawl is "Prostrate". Those beans don't stand erect and don't have a twinning climbing habit.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Hello @flowerweaver,

Got the beans today in the mail. They are very pretty, and thanks for the Tiger melon seeds. I was surprised the beans were black and white. They looked blue and white on your Flickr photos. That was a big surprise. Your seeds should be just about to you. I sent them off the next day after we had our last email conversation.

 

[sea-kangaroo]

@Pulsegleaner That seems like it's the case for some of them, but a couple others are determined to do their own thing. Sometimes I get lazy about trellising and make discoveries. Mountain Pima Burro & Caballito and Tarahumara Burro & Caballito didn't get any support but still flopped/wandered over the ground in a semi-vining way, and Tarahumara Purple Ojos is currently ignoring the lovely trellis I made for it and forming a sprawling thicket at the base. Taos Red was a bush with a couple stray tendrils the first year I grew it (without support). The second year I gave it some tomato cages which it happily grew up and stayed mostly contained within. But when I didn't trellis Blue Shackamaxon, it grew up and up and the vines twirled around each other and formed self-supporting spires several feet high, like kudzu, and then it got in my grape vines and ran up the house. Or this year I gave Lohrey's Special a couple of tomato cages and it grew all over and through and around them and made a kind of shrub.

I remember reading that Rancho Gordo grows their vining beans that way, just letting them flop all over the field, and for harvest mowing up and threshing out the whole thing. Saves them the labor of installing and hand-picking trellising.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Well, each bean does it's own thing . I simply mentioned it because it seems to be how a few of mine grow; appearing to be bushlike as long as they are standing on their own, but then if their is some support around suddenly throwing out tendril after tendril. Actually for a lot of them, that how I know they are getting ready to move into reproductive mode.

It applies to my rice beans too. I'm fairly sure that, in the first years "accident" harvest, there were a few plants that performed as true bushes shockingly (I say shockingly because according to what I have generally read, there isn't supposed to be such a thing as a bush rice bean, they're ALL vines) Now the survivors seems to cover a gamut. Most perform as basic vines, climbing around the poles (and each other) Some are sort of semi-bush creating a fairly tall upright base, and then tossing tendrils out of it. The "wrong type" one did that this year. Some of them are would technically be prostrate on their own, since they don't have the vigor to make it over to the pole (so that they'd just crawl along the ground if the other plants weren't right by them to climb over. A few this year have, like most years, basically flowered as sprouts; they got to be about 4 inches or so tall, then went straight to flowering, no branches, no vines (though I think that may be a "too late in the season, reproduce while you can" reaction.

 

[897tgigvib]

When you grow 123 varieties in one season, most by far you've never grown before, and most of them are outcrosses, you really discover the very wide variety of ways that beans can grow.

Actually, I'm amazed that seed catalogs over the years have classed beans as bush or pole.

But, by choosing to offer bush or pole beans, those classic seed companies really were putting their available varieties in a bottleneck.

Add to that, the classic seed companies had to offer bean varieties that were widely adapted, and could do well anywhere from Durango to Calgary. Which thing is good, but that also limited their varieties.

I have a couple of truly and quite actually completely prostrate varieties that spread out with stiff and determinate stems. WAX MOON and a couple of the SHOSHONES do this.

BIRD EGG is prostrate differently, with very long spreading, but not stiffly, stems which are not determinate I've found. A few Bird Egg stems have reached a climbing cage and are twining up some.

Some varieties make neat little bushes, but there are several versions of this. Some have skinny stiff stems with slow growing tips and lots of leaves. They hide their pods in the leaves or at the bottom.

Ya know, that may well be a PRE HUMAN domestication trait. Hiding pods from critters.

On the other hand, that might not be a desirable commercial trait, making harvest difficult.

But selecting against some trait like that probably removes a lot of diversity, and likely color combinations and flavors.

A trait like that could also be protection against crop failure due to birds. (I've pretty much forgotten how birds are with beans. My garden is protected from such aerial attacks, but it was the cute little Juncos and Towhees that were worse than the ravens. Oh, and the Mountain Chickadees, whatever they are officially called.)

Some varieties do grow like the classic bush, which really is quite a nice growth pattern. Great Lakes and digit's soldier come to mind. Nice upright, no worries.

Then there is all the different kinds of pole growth.

A person could just jumble sentences together with a random mix of thick or thin stems, determinate at 5 feet, indeterminate at 12 feet, topping the cage and expanding out, always needing help vining up, or rampantly twisting itself upwards. Some are 2 feet or more between leaf nodes, others a few inches.

There are varieties that grow the same, but that seems the minority by far. Most varieties have their own growth system that would be complex to categorize.

But we simplify, and that's usually close enough.

Sandpiper seems to win the vigorous pole contest this year in my garden. If I'd grown Dow Purple podded or Gold of Bacau this year, those 3 would really make for a great race! Lambada made a good competitor, as did Hanna Hank, But Hanna is finishing after cropping real good and sudden late midseason to early late.

 

[Chickie'sMomaInNH]

@sea-kangaroo, where did you get your Blue Shackamaxon beans from? those are beautiful color and i'm quite partial to the color blue. i'd like to get some but can't seem to find a source selling them.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I've probably mentioned it before, but I tend to assume that, while some variation on pole is probably the dominant form for the wild ancestor of the common and related beans, the only reason we still have so many of them now is because of where the common bean happened to develop, or more accurately of how it was integrated into the crop cycles. The three sisters and their variants are wonderful things but for the case of a bean that climbs they are reliant on having something in the field to climb on. It so happens that, because S America had corn and corn is as it is, this was no problem (even teosinte small as it is, is pretty big and robust for a grass). But now imagine a world where corn had never existed, or where it was a plant shaped more like wheat or rice (i.e. rather slender of stem) Had that been the case I imagine that most of the native people would have chose bush types beans on the grounds that putting up a lot of poles before planting was not labor effective. By the time the Europeans showed up, pole beans might very well have been all but extinct.
I consider it sort of a parallel with soybeans. Wild soybeans are a climbing vine, but nearly all domestic ones are bushy, to make field growth easier. In fact, apart from those odd black ones I can sometimes find in Chinatown, and a few varieties largely used for animal browse, I can't off the top of my head thing of ANY soy strains that are still vines. Or the fava as it stands; the only bush in a genus made up mostly of twining vines (and yes, the ancient near wild fava is also a vine. I grew it, once). Unless you were a botanist, you'd never take it for a vetch.

 

[sea-kangaroo]

@Chickie'sMomaInNH I got them from a Pennsylvanian Seed Savers Exchange member. They're usually pretty popular with SSE members, with 6-12 people offering them every year. The blue color is only in the shelly stage, though; they dry down completely black.