2019 Little Easy Bean Network - Come And Reawaken The Thrill Of Discovery

Haha, wasn't an intentional display. Just sorting them, they then go to their own plates. I have quite a few plates now. September and October will mean no room on the dining table if all goes well. But for now, here is a mini sampler, for your enjoyment

i was able to get out and do some JB removing from the beano plants and to check some of them for pods ready to come in to finish drying. with our fogs/rains it just isn't something i like to risk for Mother Nature to finish them if at all possible.

Purple Dove i picked only a part of a few rows again and there are plenty more still out there to pick. i suspect i will not be able to keep up with them and that is ok. what i needed to test this time was if "older" beans (beans that have been on the plants for a while) were still edible enough or not. so i picked some i had left before to get big and to see what they'd prep and cook up like. some were a bit tougher, i did not enjoy eating them fresh, they'd somehow gained fiber they didn't have initially also the bitter note before was more pronounced. so, no, can't eat these when they get older, but i think there is still a good amount of room to harvest these where they are still edible but it will take some experience with them to be able to tell.

in cooking them up, we were happy again this time with them, the beans are not firm and they will shrink after steamed so i can see these beans not being a particularly great canning bean. that doesn't matter to us, we don't like canned beans (i used to make three bean salad, but i consider that a much different beast than canned beans anyways ) nor do we freeze them. this time because i had more beans picked in the pot i nuked them for 9 minutes and again they were good eating (minus those i knew were too old and those weren't cooked up).

once they get past the prime fresh eating stage then they're all going on to be dry beans. i think i'm going to have plenty this year if what i'm seeing so far becomes how it finishes. eek! (that's a good eek )...

Hadn't dropped in to catch up in a while, enjoyed see the new photos and reading the grow reports. Things been busy here, weather is awful. HOT HOT and dry.
Been meaning to get some pictures of my own up and will do so pretty soon.

All but one of my network beans are dried down and ready to ship back. I'v been waiting on the one straggler, Mangetout Pleine Le Panier. Vines are one of two that are still green but I only have about 30 seeds total from it. It just refuses to bloom. I'v been pouring water to it and Wide Pod White Greasy trying to keep them going in hopes they will produce a little more when cooler weather arrives. The greasys have actually produced well but since the vines have tolerated the heat, drought and diseases no sense in pulling them out prematurely. The Mangetout however won't make any more at all if they don't start blooming.

Got some nice segregation from the off-type Refugee. A couple we probably won't like as green beans cause of purple pods and black seeds. Also a very nice looking brown seeded one with nice straight pods and a couple others.

Got maybe a pint of seed off two fifty foot rows in the back garden . The ones that the deer attacked . That particular deer will not be a problem again.

Very disappointed in my Hosier Wonders. They grew OK and made big straight pods but they turned out to be solid purple. We don't like purple pod beans.They might be good dry though, will find out this winter.

The woman has been canning pints of NT1/2 runners, her favorite for green beans. I'v got late patches of Refugee, Blue Lake and KY Wonder growing on spent corn stalks and looking pretty good. This isn't the traditional beans in corn. I grow grain corn not sweet. I plant early and when the ears are fully mature but not dry I strip all the leaves off the stalks and plant a couple beans at the base of each. Watering every few days and hopeful we'll see some late beans to can or at least for fresh eating.

Any way, that's the update for now.

been too busy to pick beans lately, but finally gave the Purple Dove another chance to see how long they would go and be reasonably edible.

the youngest ones were still good. the older ones, nope, they were not bad tasting but had more fiber than i would eat. i chewed on them a while to get the juice/pulp out of them and then spit it back out. the worms will think it just a funny cow came by or something... so i would say that by the time the plants have stopped flowering you can mostly avoid them and leave the rest for dry beans.

once the pods reach the stage where the beans inside are white or white with red that is past their prime.

in other bean news, i was watching this one plant all season in how it was growing it was so strange. it must have had some kind of mutation which meant it had a very short stature and it had a huge number of branches. it basically looked like a puff ball with very few leaves. it did have some flowers on it but none of them formed pods. i decided today that i really didn't want that mutation to be spread around so i pulled the plant but i should keep it so eventually i can get a picture.

i picked some pods that were ready in about a dozen different varieties so they can finish drying down protected from the nightly dewfall/fogs/etc. one that i called Dominoes was not fully segregated so i think i'm going to have a wide range of results from those seeds.

some good news for one of the selections/varieties that i planted that i've called Reddish Pere, it has come true and looks nice and is early enough and still a bush bean like the parents were.

i'm not sure if Lemon Slice is doing much, i see pods, but they don't look like there's much in them yet... *crosses fingers*

once again some of the pods on plants look pretty nice, but nothing in them. you would think with all the rains we've had we'd be doing ok but it seems like the heat really does a number on some of these plants. others don't seem to mind it at all.

I'm away on vacation and it's killing me not to be able to check on things and pick dry pods everyday!! Hope I don't lose any to rot while I'm gone

between tomatoes and beans i tell people i'm not available for much between August and October - along with everything else going on. right now is prime garden season with the temperatures finally moderating enough that i can get outside for most of the day minus breaks.

i hope you don't lose beans to rot too. i hate when that happens too. i would have to grow a lot fewer beans or have a lot more space with dedicated supports of some kind to help that issue out. so far i do ok, but my trials of various support techniques this season showed me that something fairly sturdy is required for some of the more slower growing climbers. i had a lot of some of them blown off their supports right when they were starting to wrap around. repeatedly. some of them gave up trying to climb.

Purple Dove look to be finishing up. no more new flowers for a while now. i was hoping with cooler temperatures that they would try to put on some more blooms, but i'm not seeing them or any new growth. the plants are starting to look faded. so i would guess these are an early and fairly determinant variety. which is excellent too for what i'm after. early is good. i think i mentioned before that they do fine with the heat during the middle of the summer as long as they're kept watered i think they didn't seem to be dropping a lot of blossoms. all of the plants had a nice crop of pods. pods with seeds. these are things that a lot of my other beans just don't do very well at times. they get pods that look ok, but when trying to get seeds there's nothing in there...

some of the younger pods are still edible, but most of the pods out there now that i've left are well past their prime for fresh eating or steaming.

so as i've said before. i'm definitely going to keep these in my rotation of plantings and hope to see a lot of fruitful crosses from them to my other beans.

i'll keep an eye on these plants for a while yet to see what happens. i'm always curious anyways.

picked through about half of the gardens yesterday for dry pods with seeds ready to come in.

the first garden i checked out was the one outside the fences where i'd planted some lima beans, two rows of wax beans and two rows of mystery beans which should have had some Lemon Slice mixed in there, but i wasn't sure, which was why i planted them outside the fence, because i didn't really know or expect much from those two rows.

the animals have been chewing on various plants at times in there. i may get a few lima beans, i'm thinking i may get no fresh seeds from the wax beans, sad, because i was hoping to have a nice supply to give away.

the two rows of mixed mystery beans, i did get a few pods ready from the Lemon Slice and they're still a pretty bean just like the parent bean. *whew!* four seeds! i wasn't sure i was going to get any of those at all from out there. i have a lot of other rows of Lemon Slice around yet to check in other gardens so that raises my hopes i'll get more beans to work with in the future (i still have a lot from the beans i found to use in the coming years from last year, but i wanted to make sure these would come true at least in part ). the mix is very much in evidence. there must be a dozen in there.

once i got inside the fenced gardens i found some Victoria Brown Eye beans ready and plenty of Green Savage and Conserva.

there were some really nice plants with all pods ready in the spaces i'd put the Dominoes, those have not fully segregated so i have a good mix of beans from those rows now to look at.

more gardens to pick through today and tomorrow once it dries out. we had a pretty good rain here last night - chance of rain again Saturday night and Sunday so i hope to get everything ready in by then. have to pick tomatoes again so it will all be happening at once again - normal for this time of the year.

One outcross from last year is giving a lot of fun for the future! The plants didn't do very well, so I got only one pod per plant, but every pod gives another seedcoat! Eye candy! I like the speckled grey and the speckled grey with white the best.

thejenx said:

One outcross from last year is giving a lot of fun for the future! The plants didn't do very well, so I got only one pod per plant, but every pod gives another seedcoat! Eye candy! I like the speckled grey and the speckled grey with white the best.

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some of those look like Dapple Grey relatives or offsprings.

i love it when i see something new and it seems each year there are plenty of out crosses showing up or futher segregations and then the new varieties to try out that keep things changing and make me think about things.