yes, @Blue-Jay i have seen some of those variations. i'm not growing out VBE that often any more though now but if i see that color/pattern come up i'll save them for you.
Tres Hatif De Massey - Bush Snap (Photo Right) This is a French snap bean. Nice flavor and stringless. William Woys Weaver set me out to find this one. I obtained it from my European contacts and I believe they acquired it from IPK the German seed bank. I sent some to Will and he wrote back and told me that it is not correct that Tres is a white seeded bean. Maybe I should give that bean some sort of name and leave it go at that. Will says he knows German and is going to look into the IPK website and try to figure out what is the correct name of this bean.
@Blue-Jay, these seeds look exactly like Fin de Villeneuve, the second variety you received from IPK Gatersleben.
With your permission, I kept five seeds each of Tres Hatif de Massy and Fin de Villeneuve as network beans. Last year, I sowed three seeds of each and kept two as a reserve. The seeds I harvested in the fall matched those I sowed. The Tres Hatif de Massy were white. This year I will have more plants and I hope that in the fall I will have 60 nice seeds of both varieties for you.
@Blue-Jay, these seeds look exactly like Fin de Villeneuve, the second variety you received from IPK Gatersleben.
With your permission, I kept five seeds each of Tres Hatif de Massy and Fin de Villeneuve as network beans. Last year, I sowed three seeds of each and kept two as a reserve. The seeds I harvested in the fall matched those I sowed. The Tres Hatif de Massy were white. This year I will have more plants and I hope that in the fall I will have 60 nice seeds of both varieties for you.
I can't remember who supplied the beans to me from IPK and did I somehow get the names of the blue one and the white one reversed? Set me straight did I rerverse the names? I think I planted some of the white ones as a pole bean and none of that seed germinated. I thought the bluish seeds did very well considering I had them planted in an area where the hours of direct sunlight was quite low. The bluish seeds made a nice stringless snap bean.
The bluish looking seeds grew as a bush bean. I harvest probably over 300 seeds of the blue bean.
Atrorious I certainly didn't mind that you kept a few seeds. To start with they were not eventually going to be for me. I was going to do a grow out for the food author William Woys Weaver in Devon, Pennsylvania who asked me to find him a number of beans he lost in his seed collection. However if I could know more of these beans history I might also include them in my collection and grow them more.
i'm not growing out VBE that often any more though now but if i see that color/pattern come up i'll save them for you.
