2015 Little Easy Bean Network - Old Beans Should Never Die !

[LonghornGardens]

Congratulations on finding it and good luck getting it through our customs officials. I have had decent luck having beans sent to me wrapped in tshirts and or stuffed in coffee cups.

 

[Blue-Jay]

I will have my sender put "Beads" and the CN-22 customs form. I will have them put a small monetary value on the form too. I have used this when sending beans to people in England, Austria, Germany, and Israel. Works so well I have those people using the idea also.

Customs here in the U.S. are getting tougher with private parties overseas sending seeds to private parties here.

 

[Blue-Jay]

I had completed the task of filling in more seed between the few beans that did emerge fairly healthy in my big bean garden Saturday. I think the window of opportunity to plant bush beans in my climate for the purpose of growing dry seed is now closed. So now it will be what it's going to be.

The last few years I have helped my nephew in-law Wayne in one of the Chicago suburbs plant his garden. I haul my roto-tiller to their house and dig up their soil, and help him get his vegies seeded and tomato plants in the ground. I was last there in early May to till up his garden patch to keep the weeds down. He took his riding lawn mower and mowed things down to a nub just to make tilling easier for me. However they have had so much rain and his garden is still not in yet. His soil needs tilling again to prepare it for planting and tilling under the weeds again. Where my nephew in-law lives they have had much more rain that I have had here in Woodstock. My neice emailed me last night and said Wayne took the riding mower out yesterday to mow down the new weed growth and got the mower stuck in the mud. She says they had more rain over the weekend and need a few days to dry out. She continued by saying shall we talk about this again in a few days. I guess my garden problems are small by comparison. It's beginning to look to me as if my nephew in-law will not be having a garden this year.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Hi @Hal,

Yup looks like another one will be coming home. Pays to scatter your varieties around. Sometimes even donate them. I should have given the HDRA my whole collection. Even all my original outcrosses. It's like music. You or I may not like a particular song, but eventually there will be someone who likes that tune. I do find that to be true.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I fully understand about your nephew this year. I still have some of my garden to get in and some that is "in" is late. Some of the early stuff I got in drowned and died or stunted. It's going to be a learning experience.

The good news is that of the five varieties you sent me I have plants from all five and they are growing. The Zambezi #3 worried me because of the first 6 I planted none came up, but I got 3 plants out of the second planting. I think it was time to renew them. We'll see what I'm able to send you this fall but I feel fairly good about my chances.

 

[Hal]

Hi @Hal,

Yup looks like another one will be coming home. Pays to scatter your varieties around. Sometimes even donate them. I should have given the HDRA my whole collection. Even all my original outcrosses. It's like music. You or I may not like a particular song, but eventually there will be someone who likes that tune. I do find that to be true.

I agree. I grow things I am not very fond of so that they stay in circulation for people who might want them but have yet to find them.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

You underline one of my most fundamental growing dilemmas. On the one hand, I wholeheartedly agree that keeping such things in circulation is of paramount importance, and can fully comprehend that that may mean growing things than one personally is not over fond of to keep them available for others. On the other hand such a stance does have the problem for me personally of sort of leading to the urges that I spend the better part of my gardening life trying to resist, the ones that say that, as I have such meagre success with pretty much everything I grow, the option I should be taking is never trying to grow ANYTHING myself, no matter how much pleasure I may get from it, and that I have a moral obligation to not merely share the seeds I find, but in fact to literally give ALL of them away as soon as I get them; that my place in the great circle is to be solely a provider, not a beneficiary; that I must sacrifice my own desires and my own well being, nay, my own very existence, in the name of the common good (this is beginning to sound way too much like a suicide note, I'm moving on)

Speaking of seeds I finally got around to taking some pictures of some stuff I wanted to show all you people. Specifically, I wanted to show you some new entries in the "what kind of bean is this?" parade. Specifically I wanted to show you some odd stuff that showed up in some lima beans I got a few weeks ago in Chinatown.

First the "base" beans (the ones that formed the majority of the beans, and are what was actually being sold

As you can see these are similar to the Christmas lima (though, based on the Christmases I have seen in health food stores, they are quite a bit bigger). I suspect (but of course, have no way to prove) that these are identical to the Chinese lima Joseph Simcox was offering in the Baker Creek Explorer series earlier this year (called Ping's Pink, if I recall).

Variant #1

This variant I am completely sure is also a lima. In fact, it may not be at all distinct from the first one. There are as you see some of these have some reddish spots in addition to the large patch (some of which are in more or less the same position as the red "rays" would be on the others. And some of the "normal" limas have that red patch at one end. So these may be nothing more than examples of the above type with a lower than normal amount of red being expressed.

Variant #2

This is the one that really has me stumped. This is obviously a VERY different strain of lima, different base color (off pink, not white) that ring around the hilum and the size (that's the same container, as the last two pictures, so you can see how much tinier these are. The thing is I'm not even sure these are limas. They were sold in limas (though that is hardly definitive) and they sort of have the lima shape (at least from the side) But they are far plumper than any lima I have ever seen which is more of a common bean trait Plus that pattern sort of reminds me of the old bean variety Mayflower, though that is a cutshort (or whatever the bean equivalent term for a crowder is) Guess I have a new project for next year.

 

[journey11]

@Pulsegleaner , LOL, I feel your pain.

Maybe you'd want to consider donating some of your least favorites or any overstock you have to a seed library to be grown, appreciated and disseminated by others. Here's a list where you might find one near to you: http://www.seedlibraries.net/ (Go to "Start a Library", then select "Sister Libraries" for a list by state.)

Seed libraries are volunteer based and operate out of regular book library locations.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

On the surface that sounds sensible. The problem is that. because every seed I find is pretty much an inclusion in something else, I really have no way of telling if two seeds are actually of the same kind at least, when I find them. They can LOOK the same, but I have learned the hard way that looks aren't everything. the little black soybeans I play around with are a good example. Some are bush (which is normal for soy) some are pole (which isn't for domestic, at least, not for domestic designed for humans to eat) some are white flowered some are pink and a few have come up bicolored and with color shots. And yet the ALL will bear seeds that are more or less indistinguishable from each other (green shading to black as they dry, and with a season that is just that little bit too long for where I live............) Coals in the Candle, Dead Man's Finger, and Rat's Tail of Sumatra are all VERY different cowpeas, but if you were to mix their seeds up I would have no way to tell one from the other (that's why I keep Coals in the Candle in a little plastic Ziploc INSIDE of the seed box, because it gets dropped so often.) So the upshot is that, for all intents and purposes, I have to treat each seed as if it is it's own separate race.

And "overstock" is a very relative, and erratic word for me with my conditions. I planted probably about four or five POUNDS of rice bean seeds this year (a rice bean is about the same size and weight as a grain of rice, so you can work out how many that is). A grand total of TEN or so made it through the animal's onslaught. And it's hardly unusual for only one or two of those that do for a lot of the crops to actually have the requisite genes to actually flower and make seed for me. Out of all of the seed types I have that came from my own growth, only four or five of them originate from more than a single parent plant.

Plus I do sort of have my ways of balancing it. When I do give out seed, it often is under what might be called a qualification plan. That is, if you asked me for rice beans, I would end up sending you the flat red ones, or if you asked for Andean corn I'd send plain yellow, since as the base colors, those are not in limited supply for me. To get any of the seed for the rarer colors ad patterns, you have to prove that the common ones grow well for you.

I also have some plans to join some sort of organization this winter mentioned on one of the other gardening forums. Basically it's sort of an agricultural match.com; matching people with seed and breeding plans with ones with land and labor.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Hey @Hal,

I've been reorganizing my 1980's bean seed collection and going through all the old seed I have from a way back. I have bean seed from as far back as 1976. I ran across this one bean a Seed Saver Exchange member sent me in 1988, and he called it Soldier Cattle Cross. A Soldier crossed with Jacob's Cattle. I took a picture of three of these and placed a representative sized solider seed I grew last season in 2014 at the bottom of these beans. I thought you should see this. I was so impressed with the soldier x cattle. I liked the pattern and the high gloss of the seed looked so nice too. You might like to try crossing these two beans. Now the Soldier I have now has a very much of a pink eye figure. Back in the 80's most of the solider types I saw being traded around were of the darker red maroon type figure. That would be the soldier I think you should use if you try this cross, but the size of this seed really got my attention when I ran across this jar of beans.

Soldier Cattle Cross From 1988.