2022 Little Easy Bean Network - We Are Beans Without Borders

[meadow]

I hadn't followed the link in that article before (I found it last year when looking for info on Good Mother Stallard), but the bean it goes to, Mawiwjwa description mentions throwing black beans:

Hopi Purple String Bean. Beautiful purple beans with black crescent-moon-shaped stripes. Some solid purple or black beans may also appear. Traditionally dry farmed on the Hopi Mesas. Wonderful tasting green beans when picked young. Dried beans are beautiful and tasty too. From our Seed Bank Collection.

 

[heirloomgal]

I hadn't followed the link in that article before (I found it last year when looking for info on Good Mother Stallard), but the bean it goes to, Mawiwjwa description mentions throwing black beans:

You can eat it as a green bean!? I had no idea!

 

[heirloomgal]

Well, @Branching Out, it looks like detective @meadow has found our answer! I didn't know it could be eaten green!

@meadow you must have a Watson...🕵️‍♀️

 

[meadow]

@heirloomgal

Sad to say it may just be a cross. A 2014 blog post:

I picked a couple more kinds of beans, this time from a Rio Zape × Purple Podded Pole cross. I'm super excited about this particular trial. So far one plant is producing white seeds with black stripes and another has pure lavender seeds. It's so hard to wait for the pods to dry.

The posts are not indexed well so...

 

[heirloomgal]

@heirloomgal

Sad to say it may just be a cross. A 2014 blog post:

I picked a couple more kinds of beans, this time from a Rio Zape × Purple Podded Pole cross. I'm super excited about this particular trial. So far one plant is producing white seeds with black stripes and another has pure lavender seeds. It's so hard to wait for the pods to dry.

The posts are not indexed well so...

I'm thinking that if Rio Zape was a particular color picked out from the Hopi Purple String landrace group as the link said, it makes sense that it might occasionally throw a black seeded plant or two. High Desert Seeds shows a picture of HPS beans with the balck beans in there. Of course, I don't know for sure. There is also something to be said for the fact that @Bluejay77 had pure seedcoats for purple and brown streaks, then I grew them and got the same thing, but then on the 3rd try @Branching Out got some black seeds in there. I wonder if as a landrace descendant it can hold off throwing blacks for that long?

 

[meadow]

Sent you pm. The person that did that study has an active blog and you may be able to ask questions. Their bio lists plant breeder or some such, can't recall exactly.

eta: graduate student at MI State University, plant breeding/genetics, specifically involved in potato breeding.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

IMO, When people, or any collective body, try to 'own' organisms or claim 'exclusive rights' to expressions within the framework of nature, or even control the 'management' of them, the outcome can only be truly frightful. Nature is the public domain.

While I certainly do agree with you on principle. I can sort of see a bit of the argument on the other side. Breeding a good new variety often does take some time and, usually a lot of money, and I can certainly see the breeder wanting to recoup some of what he or she spent doing it. In an ideal world, I suppose, people would voluntarily give the breeder some funds to make up for what they spent (or we'd live in some sort of socialist paradise where earning enough to survive was never something you had to concern yourself with). But in this world, few people are going to pay for something if they don't have to. And if you are a very little grower, and the person who gets your seeds is a very big one, it's pretty easy for them to out-produce you so much that you CAN'T sell any of yours because they can beat you on price due to volume. If you're little known, they could even claim THEY created it and find some way to get exclusive distribution rights so you COULDN'T sell, or even grow, your own anymore.

I suppose you could argue that every breeding project is supposed to be for the good of everyone, and so each breeder has an obligation to keep doing it AND handing out the fruits of their labors for free, that any costs they incurred doing that it was their DUTY to pay for the good of everyone else. But that sort of turns plant breeding from a labor of love, or even an attempt to better the human condition, into something like slavery.

 

[Artorius]

@Bluejay77 do you have a list of beans grown by Ernest B. Dana?

 

[flowerbug]

Hopi Purple String is one bean on my list of possible ancestors of Purple Dove as i do find stripes in some beans (very faintly and very fine lines). i do not get black seed spin offs (at least not yet in four seasons of growing many thousand plants).

with that many grow outs and plants i'd assume that any future black seeds would have come from my own black seeded plants.

what i do see for dark beans in the PD are the reverses but they are dark purple not black and they have some amount of white around the eye of the bean so they are not a solid color seed coat.

 

[Branching Out]

Hopi Purple String is one bean on my list of possible ancestors of Purple Dove as i do find stripes in some beans (very faintly and very fine lines). i do not get black seed spin offs (at least not yet in four seasons of growing many thousand plants).

with that many grow outs and plants i'd assume that any future black seeds would have come from my own black seeded plants.

what i do see for dark beans in the PD are the reverses but they are dark purple not black and they have some amount of white around the eye of the bean so they are not a solid color seed coat.

Thank you @heirloomgal for the Rio Zape bean query. Growing dry beans is far more complex than I ever would have thought! For my first summer of planting dry beans it was so very interesting though to plant pink beans and end up with shiny black ones that are what I believe are called cut shorts, or squarish shaped beans. (I have not developed an aversion to cut shorts yet, but I am just getting started. Lol.) As I did not realize that they were not supposed to be black I paid zero attention to this anomaly-- until I opened one of the latest pods to ripen on an adjacent plant, and low and behold I had three dusty rose beans. The black ones were prolific and ripened weeks earlier, so the 3 pink ones were the only pink ones that I got because it was so very late in the season that no more beans of either colour matured. But I was able to pry open some unripe pods of the black ones, and for me it was so interesting to see the Rio Zape swirl and also to learn of how the bean changes colour as it ripens. This is all new to me! Once they matured to full black the swirl was no longer visible.