2018 Little Easy Bean Network - Join Us In Saving Amazing Heirloom Beans

[saritabee]

All righty, my beans are in the mail! Will do a bean show with photos as soon as I finish laying the new floor in my living room... maybe Monday???? (I say that with great hope... )

I tried to bag as many beans as possible for purity, and the first bagging of the season was nearly 100%. I started with a pretty meager amount of bags, though, and I wasn't expecting the crazy heat later in the summer to cause such massive blossom drop. So I didn't end up with nearly so many bagged beans as I would have liked.

Russ, I put the bagged-for-purity beans in a smaller packet within the larger packet. I'm not sure whether you want to send those bagged beans out first to the next grower, or save them in case of emergency... up to you. There are at least a few bagged beans of every variety except the Rwanda Rainbow. The Rwanda Rainbow is almost definitely daylight sensitive; I started getting some harvestable beans by September, but not much of anything before then.

 

[Blue-Jay]

@saritabee, Thank you for all your work. Another bean show will be fun to see here

I was wondering about Rwanda Rainbow. I will have to try them here next summer.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Hi Russ, I am on the way to the post office to mail out my beans today, such as they are. You only sent me 5 Starlite and only one grew, the bed that had been safe for 4 years was hit 4 times by deer. They bit off the top of the plant and it managed to make one pod with 5 seeds, at least they should be viable. Sarconi 1 and White Kentucky Wonder did fine. Munachedda Pale is apparently not suited to my long growing season and cool nights, took forever to make pods which got a strange disease, reddish brown stuff on the pod, and weren't ripening but I did save a few seeds but they don't look like your website photos. I am also sending you some beans, Frank Barnett and North Carolina with a few reverses. Thanks, Nancy

Nancy, Thank you for the extra beans you sent. I'll be looking forward to growing them out sometime. The Kentucky Wonder white seeded and the Sarconi 1 seed are just beautiful. I was amazed at how much larger the Sarconi seed was after you grew it out. It must like your soil and climate. Thanks again and hope you will be back again in 2019.

 

[Ridgerunner]

All righty, my beans are in the mail! Will do a bean show with photos as soon as I finish laying the new floor in my living room... maybe Monday???? (I say that with great hope... )

I tried to bag as many beans as possible for purity, and the first bagging of the season was nearly 100%. I started with a pretty meager amount of bags, though, and I wasn't expecting the crazy heat later in the summer to cause such massive blossom drop. So I didn't end up with nearly so many bagged beans as I would have liked.

Russ, I put the bagged-for-purity beans in a smaller packet within the larger packet. I'm not sure whether you want to send those bagged beans out first to the next grower, or save them in case of emergency... up to you. There are at least a few bagged beans of every variety except the Rwanda Rainbow. The Rwanda Rainbow is almost definitely daylight sensitive; I started getting some harvestable beans by September, but not much of anything before then.

I was wondering about those Rwanda Rainbows. Does one plant really produce different colors/patterns or are those more likely segregations that haven't been grown out and stabilized? It is an intriguing bean and many of those colors/patterns look pretty.

 

[flowerbug]

I was wondering about those Rwanda Rainbows. Does one plant really produce different colors/patterns or are those more likely segregations that haven't been grown out and stabilized? It is an intriguing bean and many of those colors/patterns look pretty.

i would assume it is a blend of varieties until i'd grown them out a few seasons.

so far i have experience with one blend that has turned out to be about a half dozen varieties that are mostly stable. i have had a few crosses appear from growing them but as of yet they all look like crosses with things i commonly grow or with each other and nothing particularly unstable or unusual.

 

[flowerbug]

@Bluejay77 love those Purple Rose Creek and Purple Stardust beans. Purple Rose Creek looks a lot like the Purple Dove so i'm assuming this is the semi-runner selection from whichever base bean he used...

in your other pictures i'm wondering how many of your out-crosses are coming from your Bluejay beans as that seems to be similar to the patterns i'm seeing (both regular and reverse patterns).

too bad there is no easy way to DNA sequence all these beans... *sigh*

 

[Ridgerunner]

i would assume it is a blend of varieties until i'd grown them out a few seasons.

so far i have experience with one blend that has turned out to be about a half dozen varieties that are mostly stable. i have had a few crosses appear from growing them but as of yet they all look like crosses with things i commonly grow or with each other and nothing particularly unstable or unusual.

You know what it means when you assume. That's why they needed to be grown out. But yes, that's what I would expect.

 

[flowerbug]

You know what it means when you assume. That's why they needed to be grown out. But yes, that's what I would expect.

of course! unstables seem to be a very tiny minority and it makes sense to me why that would be so as it would make it harder to know if you've got the traits you want in the offspring.

because we cannot easily use DNA scanning technology we have to use the technology we have which are the visual cues from the seeds and the habits of the plants we can see (and our record keeping skills ).

 

[Blue-Jay]

I don't know how the Rwanda Rainbow got started but the seeds are a variety of colors and they are all solid colors. No patterns or markings. I would bet that all the plants in the mix are probably closely related as the colors in them all seem to have that same tone. Seed shape is all the same and sized the same. Every once in awhile there seems to be a variety that naturally produces several seed coat colors.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Russ's Bean Show Day #27​

"SOLDIER" - Bush Dry. Very productive for a bush bean. This summer was the fourth grow out of this bean since 2011. In 2014 I grew about 5 pounds of the bean and used most of them in soup and baked beans. A very good bean. Can't say anything bad about this variety. Bought this bean from Green Thumb seeds on Ebay in 2011.

"Soldier" - Bush Dry

"SONS OF THUNDER" - Pole Lima. I got this bean from a fellow in Missouri that has a large lima collection. He gets outcrosses in his limas than follow up on them just like many of us gardeners do with out beans. He told me the story behind this one but can't find the email about it anymore. I think this is an original of his. I tried growing it last year in 2017 but too much rain rotted all the seed I planted. This year was success with it but it's a very late variety. Most of my seed was harvested about a week and a half before frost killed the plants. I tried covering the plants each night frost was threatening but eventually covering them didn't help the cold got them anyway.

"Sons Of Thunder" Pole Lima.

"SPECKLED 1770" - Bush Dry. I got this bean from a lady in California in 2011 but didn't plant them for two years. They were being traded around as a mix of two colors and were said to be a cross of a soldier bean and Jacob's Cattle. So I got the idea of planting the colors seperately and found that they grow true by themselves. Both of these beans hold their Jacob's Cattle pattern for me where Jacob's Cattle will turn just mostly red for me. So one red and white bean and one bean in which I describe the color and yellow and white.

"Speckled 1770" - Bush Dry

''SQUAW" - Bush dry. I got this bean from a bean friend in Pennsylvania. I don't know anything of it's history and nobody seems to know where the bean came from. Last year in 2017 my planting of this bean was a failure because of an over abundance of rain. This year was a different story. A small planting of 5 beans yielded fairly well and gave me a crop of pretty looking beans in nice condition.

"Squaw" - Bush Dry.

"STONEY CREEK" - Bush Dry. I found a bean similar to this in 2016 as a segregation of another outcross. The color originally was kind of purple. Last year I planted it and got a small amount of seed from it and it threw off other patterns which amounted to the biggest bulk of the seed. I planted that purple spotted bean again this year and the color just totally changed to brown. The bean also again produces two other seed coats. First photo is this years version of Stoney Creek and the second and third photos are the other seed coats it produced.

"Stoney Creek" Bush Dry.

"Stoney Creek" - 2018 Segregation #1

"Stoney Creek" - 2018 Segregation #2

"SWEETWATER" - Bush Dry. I got a bean from a lady in Derby, England called Rose d' Eyragues in 2012. The bean is a small typical looking cranberry bean. A friend of hers bought the bean in a market in Paris. The first time I grow the bean some of them look a little different. Larger seed and still sort of cranberry markings with a little white on one end of the seed. So in 2014 I plant those little different looking beans and out pops this one which has not thrown off any segregations each time since I've grown it. The bean to me looks slightly like a small Jacob's Cattle pattern with streaks and markings like a cranberry bean.

"Sweetwater" - Bush Dry.

"TARAHUMARA CAPIRAME" - Bush Dry. Got this bean in 2011 from a grower in Calhan, Colorado who gardens at an altitude of over 6,500 feet above sea level. Higher than Denver. The bean is said to have come from the Tarahumara people of the Sierra Madre of northern Mexico.

"Tarahumara Capirame" - Bush Dry.