Well, better late than never, right?
I read through all the previous bean network threads last winter, and enjoyed the heck out of them! I am a bean fiend but had never tried to grow beans for seed before, so I started out small (1 variety from the growout last year: Cleopatra).
I was SUPER excited to get started (I’m still super excited!), but between the nonstop rain this spring through the end of May (my peas didn’t even start producing until July!), re-roofing our house, and then being gone nearly every weekend between the end of June and now, my Cleopatras have gone from looking like this:
to looking like this:
Lol! I guess that’s what you get for going out of town for 10 days in the depths of summer. Lucky I’m growing those beans for seed, because I’m not going to be able to get into that bed ‘til I tear everything out in the fall. (There are also some British Pop runner beans from Adaptive Seeds to separate the Cleopatras a bit from the other Phaseolus vulgaris in the garden.)
It was 107 degrees here while we were gone… thank goodness for drip watering and electrical timers. Not gonna lie, when I heard about the disgustingly high temps, my first thought might have been worrying about the bean network beans while only my second thought was worrying about the cat.
I’ve really enjoyed reading about everyone’s bean projects so far, and I’ve loved the garden layout photos! Some great ideas to implement next year.
The Cleopatras are my only bean network bean this year, but I got the bean-growout fever from reading all the LEBN threads, so I started a few other projects from seeds I already had, which were getting old and had to get grown out or else. And those have been pretty interesting, too!
I grew out a number of bush beans from 2013 and 2014 seed: Arikara Yellow, Blue Lake, Contender, Provider, Purple Queen, Roma II, and Royal Burgundy (and Eastman bush limas from Sand Hill). The Arikara Yellows and the Romas killed it this year: from approximately a 10-foot row of each, I got ample seeds for both saving and cooking… score! This makes me a bit more confident I can reliably grow for the bean network next year.
I also had a 20-foot bed along the northern side of the house… i.e. a lot of filtered sun, but basically 0% direct sun. I was intending to test which beans would do best in a growing-up-a-cornstalk environment next year, so I planted one of every kind of pole bean I had in stock at the time. It equaled out to exactly 40 types, which was perfect, and I saw that as a good sign. I also wasn’t able to hook that bed up to the drip system, so they’ve been basically unirrigated through an extremely dry Oregon summer (and through the 107 degree heat wave.) Turns out… they hated it a LOT. They all hated it. Boy, did they ever hate it.
I was totally ready to give up the experiment for good, and plant lettuce there next year, but yesterday I realized a few of them had still set seed and dried down pods (Little Brown Cat from Russ via Robert Lobitz; O’odham Vayos from Native Seeds/SEARCH; Oregon Giant from Adaptive Seeds, and Spanish Música from Renee’s Garden). It was only one or two pods per plant, but still. Really, I thought, this could be the start of a new breeding program, for non-irrigated beans that grow in 100% filtered shade. On the other hand, do I really want to waste years of low-to-no yields for the potential of a good non-irrigated shade bean? Hrm.
So that’s the Oregon bean story so far this summer. /novel. *grin*
Thank you all for sharing your bean stories!
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