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

Bluejay77 said:

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.

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your picture in the network pages doesn't reflect the above description so i'm a bit confused by this, perhaps you are describing some other bean?

@flowerbug, I didn't realize that I did that. I do have a few Rwanda Rainbow seeds left and they are like the photo. The first sample of Rwanda Rainbow that I ever saw was round beans of different solid colors. Now I'm wondering about this. These were sent to me by a fellow from Kentucky. I asked him yesterday if they were daylength sensitive and he said they were but I didn't ask about the colors. Maybe there are different versions of Rwanda Rainbow.

I got a question for you. The Lemon Slice you sent to me is marked bush or semi. Is the bean a true bush growing without runners or does it grow runners?

Also how about the bean Sunset. You also have it's growth habit marked as bush or semi. Are you unsure of their growth habit?

That's interesting how the Smith River shows different in different soil and climate.

Kentucky Wonder is one of the first kinds where I started saving my own seeds. Someone recently gave me a new pack of KY Wonder and they don't even look like mine. My seeds are larger and lighter color and pods are straighter than those pictured on the packet.

I always, if possible save my seed only from pods without any blemishes and thought that is what made the difference but perhaps adapting to my garden also had something to do with it.

flowerbug said:

@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*

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I don't know how Robert Lobitz came up with this, to me unique pattern. The one bean I think that has this color and pattern with the strongest deepest color is "Blooming Prairie".

reedy said:

That's interesting how the Smith River shows different in different soil and climate.

Kentucky Wonder is one of the first kinds where I started saving my own seeds. Someone recently gave me a new pack of KY Wonder and they don't even look like mine. My seeds are larger and lighter color and pods are straighter than those pictured on the packet.

I always, if possible save my seed only from pods without any blemishes and thought that is what made the difference but perhaps adapting to my garden also had something to do with it.

Click to expand...

There are other beans that are affected by different soil. Jacob's Cattle and some beans that have a similar pattern also seem to be affected by soil type. I don't know the mechanism that does that to the seed coat color but it does happen. I have a bean called Dog and one called Jacob's Cattle Amish that grow pretty true to type as far as the seed coat color goes no matter where I plant them. I never realized how different the soil can be even in the area of the county where I live. But I've seen changes in bean colors in different places that are no farther than about 10 miles away.

It seems to me that Kentucky Wonder was a sort of light greenish tan seed back around the late 1970's. When I was a youngster back in the early 1950's my dad raised Kentucky Wonder in his garden where the seed was dark brown. It was also known under the name "Old Homestead". When I saw KWonder in the 70's. I thought they must have totally rebred the bean for some reason.

Here is a bean that really changes with soil type. The bean is called "Ernie's Big Eye". The way this bean looks in the first photo is how I like looking at the bean the most. The bean gets this look by being grown in the New England states. I took a sample of this particular seed and grew it in my garden in Illinois in the summer of 2016 and the bean came out looking like it does in the second photo. I remind you, it is the same bean grown from this very seed in the first photo.


"Ernie's Big Eye" - Bush Dry.


"Ernie's Big Eye" - Bush Dry Grown In 2016 In Illinois.

Bluejay77 said:

@flowerbug, I didn't realize that I did that. I do have a few Rwanda Rainbow seeds left and they are like the photo. The first sample of Rwanda Rainbow that I ever saw was round beans of different solid colors. Now I'm wondering about this. These were sent to me by a fellow from Kentucky. I asked him yesterday if they were daylength sensitive and he said they were but I didn't ask about the colors. Maybe there are different versions of Rwanda Rainbow.

I got a question for you. The Lemon Slice you sent to me is marked bush or semi. Is the bean a true bush growing without runners or does it grow runners?

Also how about the bean Sunset. You also have it's growth habit marked as bush or semi. Are you unsure of their growth habit?

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correct, i am unsure of their growth habit.

i started the season with the best of intentions to keep track of each variety i planted in many regards and got as far as germination rates and that was it. some varieties were obvious to keep apart and others weren't...

Lemon Slice was new this year. the parents were likely semi-runner beans, but that is not 100% known for sure as i have grown some bush beans with yellow in them the past few years. given that the majority of the beans i grow are either bush or semi-runner that is the best guess i can make for those until next year's grow out.

Sunset i've grown a few years now and i don't recall them being huge plants - likely one of the parents was a bush bean (for the red hints) and the other was a semi-runner.

Bluejay77 said:

I don't know how Robert Lobitz came up with this, to me unique pattern. The one bean I think that has this color and pattern with the strongest deepest color is "Blooming Prairie".

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i cannot really tell much of a difference between many of his named purple beans from the pictures. i'm assuming that if i had them in piles in front of me i'd be able to tell them apart.

p.s. in the "extra beans" for the Purple Dove i sent back to you there were a few differently sized beans and also some of varying color included that i would have selected out and kept track of for further plantings. when i was dividing the harvest from this season to send back i made sure to include all the variations i was seeing in the PD seeds. in the "first selection" i included in the heavier envelope those were selected based more upon the color being darker purple and a more uniform size.

Bluejay77 said:

...
It seems to me that Kentucky Wonder was a sort of light greenish tan seed back around the late 1970's. When I was a youngster back in the early 1950's my dad raised Kentucky Wonder in his garden where the seed was dark brown. It was also known under the name "Old Homestead". When I saw KWonder in the 70's. I thought they must have totally rebred the bean for some reason.

Click to expand...

I don't ever recall a greenish appearance to KY Wonder seeds, all I ever remember is the dark brown. That's going back to the early 1960s. I'v grown them ever since then and the dark brown is what I started with when I started saving my own seed a coupe decades ago. They transformed either because of adaptation to the soil or my saving practices into a larger light brown seed. They are about my favorite for green beans and if you cook them dry with a little onion and bacon they taste almost the same as they do as green beans.

Bluejay77 said:

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.

Click to expand...

As I believe I mentioned earlier, one of the Rwandan Rainbow seed colors (a sort of unusually strong kidney bean maroon) seems to also be present in some small off type seeds that showed up in my packets of Speckled Grey from Richter's (which are Ugandan). Though clearly not identical (mine matured around June so it sounds like they are a different day length) they are likely related*.

Polychromatic beans seem sort of common in the Mid-African material. When I first got Fort Portal Violet, it was called Fort Portal mixed, and had shades ranging from maroon to browns tans and olives. The purple color (which in fact was only present on ONE bean in the initial growth) only showed up on all of them after they had grown (what happened to the other colors, or why they never seemed to come back, I have no idea).

Same thing with my Bantu beans, dozens of colors in, only purple out.

On the other hand, mixes seem to be common as well. Speckled Grey SEEMED to be a variable bean when I got with it's distribution of two main colors (solid black/purple and the Pebblestone like pattern) on secondary (black with white specks, which is sort of what you might expect a color reversal of the Pebblestone to look like) and a few outliers (which were probably other ones that had gotten in by mistake) But as each one seems to only throw back it's own color/pattern, I came to the conclusion that it is a mix with each separate**.

Even Fort Portal Violet is still a little of a mix since there is also Fort Portal Violet Extra which is slightly different (bigger plant, extra seed per pod (four as opposed to three***) and slightly bigger seed.

*Incidentally what color flowers did the Rawandan Rainbow had. One of the ways I figured out that the red ones were something different is that their flowers were white, as opposed to the purple of the others.

**Actually I knew that when they first sprouted. The black ones had strong cotyledon mottling (like Fort Portal Violet) while the speckled ones don't.

*** It's consistent so it's likely genetic.