2022 Little Easy Bean Network - We Are Beans Without Borders

[Pulsegleaner]

I think bean and pea weevils are the same thing? Grain weevils can also attack beans but I don't think it's their preferred crop. Your best bet is to avoid them in the first place by freezing anything you might plant.

I only get weevils in my community garden plot. I don't replant those beans and often I pick them, shell them in the garden, and put them directly into bags that go into a freezer til I'm ready to can beans. The large scale damage doesn't tend to come until they've been sitting in boxes for weeks and have had time to reproduce.

You'll know if you have weevils because the beans will have some swiss-cheese-like holes in them and there'll be little patches of bean skin laying under them as if someone took a teeny tiny hole punch to them.

I don't think they are. As I said, my Bambara groundnut weevils didn't touch the lablab beans which I have also found weevils in at time. So I think each species is legume specific, or, at least, can only prey on a very narrow range. The lablabs have their weevil, the rice beans have theirs, and so on.

 

[jbosmith]

I don't think they are. As I said, my Bambara groundnut weevils didn't touch the lablab beans which I have also found weevils in at time. So I think each species is legume specific, or, at least, can only prey on a very narrow range. The lablabs have their weevil, the rice beans have theirs, and so on.

Hmm this is interesting. For once I wish I had bean weevils this year so I could experiment!

I want to hear about your lablabs. Do you eat them? We often grow them as an ornamental but I've never even eaten the shoots.

 

[Blue-Jay]

But then don't you still have the dead weevil inside? I'm thinking of the beans that I want to eat. 🤢 Is there some way to prevent the beans from getting infested in the first place?

If you have weevils in the area where you live you can't stop them from getting into the beans. They lay eggs under the developing seed coat when the pod is very young and soft and the seeds are very small and soft too. If you freeze your beans like about early November you will stop the egg from developing into the adult insect. The eggs are probably too small to see with the naked eye even if you had one on the tip of your finger. After you have frozen the beans for several days you can still eat the beans. Cook them and you will never see bugs in your soup. If a bean came apart in your cooking pot you will still never be aware of the eggs. They blend right in with the rest of the beans material.

Back in the 1970s I lived in the county just to the west of where I live now and there were bean weevils there. The first time I was aware that I had weevils in my beans they never hatched out of my beans until around Christmas or slightly after. From that point on in the future. I made sure to freeze my beans just as soon as they were dry enough to do so. I figured by early November they were very dry and I froze them in a freezer set at about zero F. My beans always grew when I planted them and I ate them too. Never was aware of any weevil eggs in the beans.

I wouldn't let this turn into a phobia for you and spoil your enjoyment of beans.

 

[meadow]

I think bean and pea weevils are the same thing?

Unlike bean weevils, pea weevils have a distinctive white marking (in the shape of an aeroplane) on their bottom. Their reproduction is triggered by blossoms and they only damage the pea that they've grown in. They are not a threat to pantry goods once they've escaped from the pea. From what little I've read, I have the impression that pea weevils are much less destructive than bean weevils.

Unfortunately the pea weevils are already in the garden. It has just occurred to me that perhaps they may be able to complete their life cycle on the beans too? I sure hope not.

Do your beans do okay being frozen so soon after harvesting? I should have kept the stragglers separate because the earlier beans are dry enough to shatter but I don't think that is the case for the recently dry ones.

 

[meadow]

I don't think they are. As I said, my Bambara groundnut weevils didn't touch the lablab beans which I have also found weevils in at time. So I think each species is legume specific, or, at least, can only prey on a very narrow range. The lablabs have their weevil, the rice beans have theirs, and so on.

That is so good to hear!!!

 

[meadow]

If you have weevils in the area where you live you can't stop them from getting into the beans. They lay eggs under the developing seed coat when the pod is very young and soft and the seeds are very small and soft too. If you freeze your beans like about early November you will stop the egg from developing into the adult insect. The eggs are probably too small to see with the naked eye even if you had one on the tip of your finger. After you have frozen the beans for several days you can still eat the beans. Cook them and you will never see bugs in your soup. If a bean came apart in your cooking pot you will still never be aware of the eggs. They blend right in with the rest of the beans material.

Back in the 1970s I lived in the county just to the west of where I live now and there were bean weevils there. The first time I was aware that I had weevils in my beans they never hatched out of my beans until around Christmas or slightly after. From that point on in the future. I made sure to freeze my beans just as soon as they were dry enough to do so. I figured by early November they were very dry and I froze them in a freezer set at about zero F. My beans always grew when I planted them and I ate them too. Never was aware of any weevil eggs in the beans.

I wouldn't let this turn into a phobia for you and spoil your enjoyment of beans.

Thank you so much. This is a big relief.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Hmm this is interesting. For once I wish I had bean weevils this year so I could experiment!

I want to hear about your lablabs. Do you eat them? We often grow them as an ornamental but I've never even eaten the shoots.

I usually don't, since most of the more edible ones are too day length sensitive to produce here (I have a pot full of plants this year from nine or so odd ones I found in a bin in Chinatown, and they have yet to produce a single blossom.) The only one that reliably goes full term here is Ruby Moon, and that's not a great one for eating (in general, if the lablab you have has seeds that are any color other than white/cream, the mature seeds will be poisonous) I SUPPOSE I could eat immature pods if I wanted (those are a lot safer) but, again, only one type, and Ruby Moon isn't supposed to taste very good. That's really what all the experiments are about, to find some OTHER ones that work here that are more appetizing.

 

[jbosmith]

I usually don't, since most of the more edible ones are too day length sensitive to produce here (I have a pot full of plants this year from nine or so odd ones I found in a bin in Chinatown, and they have yet to produce a single blossom.) The only one that reliably goes full term here is Ruby Moon, and that's not a great one for eating (in general, if the lablab you have has seeds that are any color other than white/cream, the mature seeds will be poisonous) I SUPPOSE I could eat immature pods if I wanted (those are a lot safer) but, again, only one type, and Ruby Moon isn't supposed to taste very good. That's really what all the experiments are about, to find some OTHER ones that work here that are more appetizing.

Hmm I think we had 'Purple Moon' from Kitazawa last year, but again just as an ornamental. Whatever we got this year was also purple, and grew huge, but hasn't produced a single flower. There's so many different beans that I'm ok with lablabs only being ornamentals, but the beans are just so cute!

 

[jbosmith]

Do your beans do okay being frozen so soon after harvesting? I should have kept the stragglers separate because the earlier beans are dry enough to shatter but I don't think that is the case for the recently dry ones.

I have a bunch of pretty disparate gardens, one at home, one at a community garden, and two at a farm that some friends own, and have only had the weevils in the community garden plot. I usually either pressure can or freeze those immediately so that, if they have weevils, they can't infect anything else. This year I have them in containers that the weevils couldn't escape from, just to see what happens, but haven't seen any yet.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Hmm I think we had 'Purple Moon' from Kitazawa last year, but again just as an ornamental. Whatever we got this year was also purple, and grew huge, but hasn't produced a single flower. There's so many different beans that I'm ok with lablabs only being ornamentals, but the beans are just so cute!

I think Purple Moon and Ruby Moon may be the same variety, just with different descriptions of the color (it's not like Ruby Moon is red).

In general you only get two colors of plant with lablabs, purple and green (which is why I really wish they hadn't swapped the name from Dolichos Lablab to Lablab purpureus, it's just waiting there to confuse someone the fisrt time they bump into one that isn't purple. Same with the change from Psophocarpus tetragonalobus to Tetragonalobis purpureus, not all wing beans are purple (in fact, fairly few are)).

Most of the ones I play around with have no names, since I get them from either pods in the Indian grocery stores that are overripe (occasionally*). or picked out of the bulk bags of the dry white ones from the same source. Chinese ones tend to be a bit bigger and wider than the Indian ones, but there is a lot of variation in both groups (and I haven't even been able to TOUCH the whole pool of varieties that are to be found in Africa and Southeast Asia.)


*The problem with this path is that it turns out that lablab beans have to be VERY far along their maturity curve before they are viable. Seed that for any other bean would be way past the minimum maturity date just doesn't grow with lablabs.)