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Exciting to have the 2026 thread started so promptly and with much appreciated warm words. Great! Bobis d’Albenga (Albenga I believe rather than Albanga) is a bush variety from Albenga in Italy. I grew it in 2024. It’s a vigorous productive variety of purple splashed snap beans. I’m happy to...

Steve, thank you for the overview and the link to the previous thread. It sounds as though growing ginger for you too is really expensive in terms of compost, time and effort. I think I’ll revert to my previous feeling which is that, for me, it’s not really worthwhile, much as I love ginger...

I’d be really interested to know how you grow your ginger. Under cover? In pots? Any special treatment? I’ve tried it once in pots in my greenhouse but had such a small yield that I haven’t tried again. Yours looks very good. Am I missing something?

I tend to think of mustards and oriental greens as being on a scale from peppery to mild. At the most peppery end are the mustards like Green Wave etc. At the mildest end would perhaps be tatsoi. Yukina savoy is inbetween but nearer the mild end. Mizuna is perhaps about similar or even milder...

I’ve grown Yukina Savoy a few times. For me it’s been an over-wintering crop sown around August to plant out under cover, or outdoors but somewhere protected. It’s a kind of more puckered version of tatsoi on quite a lot smaller scale than collards. I suspect that it would quite quickly go to...

I’ve put it on my growing list for next year to check it out again.

Thank you for the link. I’ve begun to into Lucy Thompson’s book and it promises to be fascinating.

It was a bush bean. I received it as bush and indeed it was!

Green Albufeira is a bean I last grew in 2019 but I remember liking it very much. My notes say, Dry. Not brilliant for shelling. OK for snap but tends to get too big quickly. Albufeira is in the Algarve A very high yielding variety, with big heavy green beans, not yet tested for stringiness. A...

Lovely selection. Carrying on the discussion about photos in sun compared with photos in shade, the colours of Bażanowice, for example. look so very different in your two pictures. It would be interesting to know whether one seems truer than the other to you.

Some bean harvests that I have specially enjoyed. Amish Gnuddle. I like the frosted patterning and understated colouring. The plants weren't vigorous for me, perhaps only 4ft tall. Not a huge crop but I enjoyed what was produced. I believe there are many variant spellings for this variety...

That is fascinating,@Artorius. Thank you very much for this great information. As you suggest it’s amazing that samples were collected in such circumstances. The urge to continue scientific research and preservation is clearly strong in the most difficult situations. I’m guessing the samples...

Interesting. Where you have taken comparative photos in sun and also in shade the apparent difference in colour is considerable. The sun photos are very appealing but I’m thinking that the shade photos probably give more of a faithful impression of the true colour and also show detail more...

On the subject of Polish commercial varieties I’d very much like to understand the naming of a bean I’ve recently received. It is held by Bohnenatlas but was threatened with extinction. A friend managed to germinate some old seed and has given me some seeds to grow on. I’d like to bulk it up and...

I find beds of lettuces extremely satisfying, alternate rows of green and red-flushed, of smooth leaved and crinkly leaved, for example. So I grow more than we eat. I’ve enjoyed many of the varieties bred by Frank Morton. I’ve also very much enjoyed experimenting with which varieties will...

That’s extremely impressive. A great achievement.

I do find that they’re late but they have made it in time reasonably comfortably. In a cool season it might be quite borderline.

That’s a huge amount of varieties in your seed crop, not to mention a host of other life pressures. I feel at full stretch doing roughly half of the numbers you do. The only things I do more of would be that I that I do 20+ lettuce varieties, (guessing because I haven’t counted yet), more...

I'm delighted you had good true-to-type seed as I grew them myself and had some off-types - plain black. Were all yours true St Anthony?

It seems that the term is used differently in UK from in US. I think @flowerbug is right in suggesting a connection with size but in Britain the term seems historically to be used for this kind of bi-coloured bean whereas in US it is more likely to be used for navy beans, ie. small white beans...