2021 Little Easy Bean Network - Bean Lovers Come Discover Something New !

[jbosmith]

Seed Swap Saturday October 2, 2021 At Teneesee Tech Facility in Livingston, Tennessee. 925 Deck Cove Road.​

These pics are great. I love the rows upon rows of beans in greenhouses and I want someone to build a maze out of those lima beans!

 

[Blue-Jay]

Welcome to LEBN and TEG @jbosmith. The more partcipants we have the more interesting and more fun our bean thread becomes. Also a welcome to @Boilergardener and @pjn I hope you will join us more often too.

 

[flowerbug]

i go on a lot about Purple Dove, but what can i say, i like it and i think to be more accurate about them i think they are a blend of several in there because as i am shelling them out i notice and select seeds for replanting. the pods are not uniform width or length and the seeds do also vary in size and colors and patterns (even seeds grown in the same rows in the same gardens can be quite different from each other). since i have grown them i have maintained a selection in the blend of about how they were when i got them, but i am also applying some selection criteria so that if someone wanted a more white bean and less purple on the seeds they could do that from whatever samples i am giving out. up to them.

so far in my shelling out of this bag i'm finding a fair amount of unfinished beans (but gladly not as bad as Painted Pony or the Red Ryder beans). some spoilage is expected with the amount of rains we had the weeks when they were drying down and also some are dragging on the ground for a while before i get them picked so it isn't a surprise to me at all. i just put them down as worm food and that's ok with me. always a good idea to give some back to the soil community anyways...

the primary purpose now of growing so many Purple Dove beans is for fresh eating so seed production and finding new out crosses is not the main reason for growing them, yet it is an eventual hoped for thing to have happen and for me to find them and then see what happens next. that is after all why i do enjoy growing beans so much is that they'll keep you busy and thinking about what your goals might be and what priorities and what selection pressures you want to apply to each bean or new out cross that shows up. gives my brain something fun to chew on.

 

[Boilergardener]

Welcome to LEBN and TEG @jbosmith. The more partcipants we have the more interesting and more fun our bean thread becomes. Also a welcome to @Boilergardener and @pjn I hope you will join us more often too.

It was exciting growing the network beans for the first time. I like that we can work to keep the genetics from disappearing and the history on some of these varieties is really interesting. I have learned quite alot so far by reading the past pages on this thread.

I grew out Gauk, Lekatt, coco de belle Isle, Vulkan, potawatomi pole, Holstein, and krasavica in a NE indiana in a silty clay- loam soil type which is technically very poorly draining soil, but the soil test values are high in every important category, and I have the beans in raised soil not raised beds but hilled soil to help the water get away so that helps I think.
And with the extremely "wet" growing season, July especially, i still managed to have a crop and did get the bean allocation needed, barely on 1 or 2 varieties. The beans just had alot of disease from the high moisture and heat in july. Brown spots, whitish molds, etc.
I actually had very tiny worms early, I learned were "sod webworms" and they were very good at picking out and eating the network beans almost exclusively at seedlings - V1 stage or seedling stage of growth which was frustrating. I had never had them eat beans before (my 3rd year growing dry beans). But thankfully not too many network beans were wiped out. Some of the non network beans excelled such as Russ's Red turtle, petit gris, and miami Ohio pole bean (I obtained from a SSE member) excelled.

I started out growing dry beans 3 yrs ago just by looking at the standard seed catalogs. I bought Brightstone and early Warwick from adaptive seeds, and i believe vermont cranberry and a french horticultural from seeds and such or some place like that. This is before I discovered SSE or the network. The summer of 19 will be remembered as the wettest on record for my area. The farmers I work with at my job told me they couldnt remember a worse year (2019) for rain and flooding. maybe 1986 I think? Was also very bad. All my beans died that year except brightstone and early warwick which they somehow survived, and excelled. I saved the seed and they have grown fine ever since. I then discovered the network and SSE and i cant believe just how many beans there are out there!

 

[heirloomgal]

Work for tonight, 'Fawcett's Pole'.
Happy with how productive it was, but it's skins dry very tight to the beans, and we know what that means.

This was my first year to try something different from a wire mesh trellis for pole beans. I do really like that you can easily pop poles out of the ground, and dry the whole vine under cover, without pulling each bean. Maybe it's just superstition on my part but I've always felt more likely to get good seed in pods that finish drying attached to the vine, than pulled off individually. It's much more attractive looking to grow them on poles as well. The trellised beans did not get bothered by moles though, except 3 plants. Too much exposure for them along the row, whereas the poles made a forest like feel and even the mice ran freely through there. I think they matured a little more quickly on the wire too. Pluses and minuses to both methods I guess.

Probably won't have enough integrity for next year though. Was quite a bit of work to cut and drag them the distance we did. Thank goodness I have little people to provide free labour

Such a practical feature, to transport them anywhere to get away from rain.

Can't ask for better drying down weather for the last week, super warm and dry. I can hardly believe it, but because of the exceptionally warm extended weather I'm actually going to get just about every pod out there to mature. Even the Piekny Jas beans will probably have very few green pods remaining on the vine, and they began blooming a bit later than the others.

 

[Zeedman]

We are having an extended Summer here as well... unfortunately, only a few legumes are taking advantage of it. All of the common beans are dead except for Fortex (which is producing a late drop of snaps) and Jembo Polish, which is still producing shellies. Piekny Jas is still producing a few huge shellies as well. Both of those beans have already produced a large amount of dry seed.


"Jembo Polish" (left), "Piekny Jas" (right). For some reason, my large white-seeded runner beans hardly ever completely fill out (although "Piekny Jas" did better than "Gigandes"). All of the runner beans with colored seeds fill out - ??? I'm hoping that the white-seeded runners just need a few generations to adapt to my climate. At least the huge shellies appear normal.

The last soybean (PI 427088 I) is benefiting from the late freeze, is drying down, and will be harvested in a few days. The second set of "Yellow Mungo" have been drying down, but the plants have begun dying & only about 1/2 of those pods will make it to maturity. The second set of "MN 13" cowpea is also drying down, and is about 1/2 of the first harvest (this is the 2nd time that MN 13 has matured a large second set of pods in my short summers). The "21 Peas" cowpea is still producing (albeit slowly) and is putting out new growth - after almost dying during the flooding rains. I really love its tenacity.

The semi-yardlong "Thailand Pole" was still producing a few tender pods, but we cut them down to clear & turn over that plot. It performed really well; cowpeas & yardlongs were the big winners this year.

 

[jbosmith]

We are having an extended Summer here as well...

Hello fellow cold season grower! What are your normal frost dates there? My coldest (3b) garden has a standard June 1 - September 1 growing season but, this year, the last frost was in early May and we have yet to have one this fall! I actually cut down living tomatoes and peppers yesterday to make room for garlic, a first for me.

I'd love to hear what suggestions people have for short season varieties. Ga Ga Hut and Seneca Allegheny Pinto, which are very similar, are my most reliable beans. I also grow a black bean called Turtle Peas which will produce a good crop but only dry about 1/3 of them before a frost most years. They don't dry well inside so it's a mad scramble of peeling wet pods for a week to get the most out of them. I love the variety though so I keep growing them. Season-wise there's a lot of bush beans that will ripen here, but it's also a wet climate so it's tough to get clean pods and I generally don't bother with them.

 

[Boilergardener]

Hello fellow cold season grower! What are your normal frost dates there? My coldest (3b) garden has a standard June 1 - September 1 growing season but, this year, the last frost was in early May and we have yet to have one this fall! I actually cut down living tomatoes and peppers yesterday to make room for garlic, a first for me.

I'd love to hear what suggestions people have for short season varieties. Ga Ga Hut and Seneca Allegheny Pinto, which are very similar, are my most reliable beans. I also grow a black bean called Turtle Peas which will produce a good crop but only dry about 1/3 of them before a frost most years. They don't dry well inside so it's a mad scramble of peeling wet pods for a week to get the most out of them. I love the variety though so I keep growing them. Season-wise there's a lot of bush beans that will ripen here, but it's also a wet climate so it's tough to get clean pods and I gener

I accidentally posted before I completed the sentence oops. Usually last spring frost is 1st week may so 2nd week keeps us safe.

Ive only grown like 15-20 kinds of dry beans so far and of those Early Warwick is quite early (as the name suggests) and I just used them in the Blue Jay bean soup recipe today and they were wonderful. Russ has a bean Red Turtle that was even earlier than early Warwick by I think 1.5 to two weeks and was an awesome producer. I think i was harvesting some red turtle pods in the end of July. If i remember correctly

 

[flowerbug]

I accidentally posted before I completed the sentence oops.

there is a delete button on posts you make so you can remove that post.

Usually last spring frost is 1st week may so 2nd week keeps us safe.

Ive only grown like 15-20 kinds of dry beans so far and of those Early Warwick is quite early (as the name suggests) and I just used them in the Blue Jay bean soup recipe today and they were wonderful. Russ has a bean Red Turtle that was even earlier than early Warwick by I think 1.5 to two weeks and was an awesome producer. I think i was harvesting some red turtle pods in the end of July. If i remember correctly

my earliest beans are Purple Dove, Red Ryder (a small red kidney bean) and a few others that have shown up as crosses (Huey and Sunset). i'm always looking for others that will work in our soils/climate too, but we do have a longer season. i still consider anything that finishes by September 15th as early here. it is a long season this year we're almost a month later and no frost in the forecast for this next week either.

i did try Early Warwick and while it was early in our garden soils it doesn't do that well compared to others so i only plant a few once in a while to keep the seeds fresh enough but not in any mass plantings for bulk beans. i do like the colors and shape of it so i'm glad to see that i now have a potential cross breed with some white on the end so it is distinctive enough for me to grow it. i'll be trialing it next year in multiple gardens to see how it does and how early it might be in comparison. the hard thing though is to get a real comparison is that i don't plant all the gardens at the exact same time so i still have to guess how they compare in some ways. the main thing though is for me to get them tried out in the harder soil gardens we have so i can tell if they'll work here as a bulk bean. for time length it is important that they finish early enough but often i can work around that by a few weeks if the weather will cooperate and i can get enough harvested and brought in before the wet weather or frosts mess them up.

this year, dry and wet were all over the map, we had early hot and wet, then hot and dry and then wet and cooler and then dry again, then wet wet wet (now). i'm glad most of my dry beans were harvested weeks ago, but i'm still discarding a fair amount of those to be fed to the worms. that's ok, we have enough, but not as much as i'd hoped. the worms will enjoy their treats.

 

[Blue-Jay]

I planted my raised bed bush beans on June 5th. I had a large group of those bush dry beans gave me their first dry pods on August 16th and another large group of varieties that gave me their first dry pod on August 20th. Their were other beans that gave their first dry pods even later like late August and early September. However among the the August 16th group John's Bean finished with all it's dry pods about two weeks earlier that all the other varieties. It was the first bean to be totally picked out in about two weeks. A very fast dry down. Also fast to defolitate.

Also our usual first frost date is about between October 10th to the 15th. According to what I'm seeing for predicted temperatures. It appears we still won't have our first frost by the 24th of October but I suppose that is still subject to change.