2022 Little Easy Bean Network - We Are Beans Without Borders

[Blue-Jay]

A little something more for @meadow.

I spent yesterday afternoon pulling and hanging bush bean plants. Below is a photo of a lot of yesterday's work.

Also two photos of one pole that I loaded up last Saturday. The pods were all dried out by yesterday and I photoed them before I clipped them all off. This is what you get with sun dried plants and pods gotten off the damp soil and into the air.

This is some of the work I did yesterday afternoon in the bush bean plot west bed

This is one of the poles I hung plants on last Saturday. This is the top of the pole. The pods were dried pretty nice and I didn't have a lot of seed loss.

This is middle of the pole. So this is what you get with sun dried plants and pods. There are sometimes nearly a dozen plants hanging on one of these poles.

 

[HmooseK]

@Zeedman

Just to touch base with you. The MN150 do not seem to mind being grown in a container. These were very resilient and even after sustaining damage during a storm they bounced right back. They are also the first peas to bloom and make peas. I grew several varieties this year and these are in the top 3 with their ability to sustain damage and bounce back. The other two being “big boy and red ripper.” Thank you for the opportunity to try these.

 

[Zeedman]

@Zeedman

Just to touch base with you. The MN150 do not seem to mind being grown in a container. These were very resilient and even after sustaining damage during a storm they bounced right back. They are also the first peas to bloom and make peas. I grew several varieties this year and these are in the top 3 with their ability to sustain damage and bounce back. The other two being “big boy and red ripper.” Thank you for the opportunity to try these.

Glad to see MN 150 doing so well there (as it did years ago for @FlipTx). It surprises me to hear that Red Ripper is doing well... not because of your climate (which I know it tolerates) but because I would have thought it poorly suited to pot culture. Those plants are HUGE. I grew "21 Peas" last year, which I have been told is just another name (or strain?) of Red Ripper. The vines climbed a 6' trellis & were heavily branched.

My only cowpea this year, "Washday Pea", has been uncharacteristically slow to develop. The pods are only a little further along than the pods in your photo. Which is surprising, given that they were started & transplanted on the same day as all of the yardlong beans - and those have not only been bearing, but have already produced dry seed. I would have expected Washday to be at a similar stage of development. It is growing in the new garden extension though, and the soil there is less fertile. The soybeans in that area are slightly stunted as well... but the "Blue Marbutt" pole beans, also in that area, are very vigorous. Go figure.

 

[heirloomgal]

@bluejay I'm both happy and relieved to report that network beans Pale Gray Lavender and Fasold - beans I was worried I might not get enough seed from - have both surpassed the 60 good quality seeds mark! YAHOO! I had trouble with mould more and more as the season went on with Fasold, but they still have dried enough good pods to be a success! The 3 PGL plants, as you know, not being a pole, did not have a great year production wise but they still produced enough to get me over 60, and the seeds are very nice as well. What a relief! For now, I'm not (yet) feeling any real concerns about the others as there is time and the weather continues to be very good & dry. Green Savage is definitely going to be fine as well. That bean did very well.

This year, generally, production has been somewhat of a bust. Only a few varieties had what I would call a 'great year'. The Bounty Hunter semi runner was one, Wild Gonny another. I'm happy with the quality of the seeds, but I think the early cold wet buggy spell in June set things off to a bad start. I honestly think beans - of all the seeds I save - are the hardest species to get all the way to that end stage of perfect dried seed!

 

[flowerbug]

... I honestly think beans - of all the seeds I save - are the hardest species to get all the way to that end stage of perfect dried seed!

for me it is usually only the larger beans i have more trouble with as compared to results for the smaller beans i've grown. also certain varieties have been difficult (like FPJ) which i managed to do well with this season by growing them in pots (bringing them inside on too hot days) and finding out that yes, indeed they are a half-runner after all. when i've grown them outside in all of my gardens they've never gotten big enough to do any kind of running at all.

tomorrow should be an adventure in bean varieties as i have plants to pick all morning as soon as the dew burns off enough that i can get it done. i should be able to get a few hours in at the least and if there's a nice enough breeze perhaps into the afternoon. we'll see. i have a lot of dry bean pods out there to pick now so a few days of picking should get me well along in the beginning of the harvest.

 

[meadow]

Thank you for those beautiful pictures, @Bluejay77!

I made bundles of 2-3 plants each to maximize airflow (we're having a lot of clouds) and hung them across some cattle panel trellising.

 

[Blue-Jay]

I took a few photos of my Jeminez grow out in my south flowerbed yesterday. I would like to see the pods get even redder than this before they dry. I don't know if they will. Large seeded bean. I have 4 poles planted to Jeminez. They are planted only next to my Andromeda lima. The nearest pole beans are growing in the backyard on the other side of my vinyl privacy fence at least 80 feet away with tomatoes and zinnias in the backyard also. So I don't think there really is a chance of any crossing. Check out the length of the one Jeminez pod. I will have plenty of Jeminez seed this year. The seed I planted was from 2013 and whatever didn't germinate I filled in with 2017 seed. I couldn't get a good photo on the fourth pole.

 

[meadow]

I took a few photos of my Jeminez grow out in my south flowerbed yesterday.

Wow! Those are pretty enough to be an ornamental.

 

[flowerbug]

the first of the lavender bean pods gave me some beautiful beans. last year i was wondering if they really were going to be lavender colored at all as they were so pale, but these are darker and look much nicer. there are a lot of green pods still out there to finish so i hope the rest look as nice as these first ones. nicer garden soil helps.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I'm not sure @meadow, I wonder if the variety was a bunch of neat looking beans from a certain area that were collected and put together, then called Ugandan Bantu. Even the pod shapes are quite distinct at this point.


[/QUOTE]
It was, so said Joe Simcox when he first offered it in Richter's Herbs Seed Zoo. The packet I got had beans that were more or less the shape of Fort Portal Jade beans, but in many colors* But I have heard from people since about getting the odd striped kidney shaped bean in theirs, so it was probably in there. I know in MINE there was on off bean, a smaller, flatter mustard colored one, but that one did not germinate.

*At that time, the Fort Portal Jade packets also had the odd non-green seed (in mine there was a purple one and a steel blue one)**. However, when I checked with them to make sure that they hadn't packed some bantu in a FPJ packet by mistake, the told me that, in order to keep this from happening again, they were re-opening all of the FPJ packs and removing all non-green seeds. What HAPPENED to those seeds (whether they were tossed, or added to the Bantu where they would not be noticed) I have no idea.

As for my two offs, I misplaced the blue one so never got to plant it. I DID plant the purple one, but it was in the same pot and time as I planted my Bantu's, and since EVERYTHING came back that shade of purple for me, I have no way to tell if the purple FPJ is one of the ones that made seed, or not.

A similar thing happened with Fort Portal Mixed, which was a mixture of many colors of long/kidney shaped beans. Many colors went in, only purple came out with everything exactly the same as everything else (well, except for one plant that probably came from an extra large bean (which was the only one that was purple to begin with, which produced pods with one extra bean chamber [four instead of three]. So that's why I re-named it Fort Portal Violet, since it wasn't mixed anymore, and it seemed no one else had gotten that one (so all the seed I knew of originally came from my seed) with the extra bean one becoming Fort Portal Violet Supreme.

**A parallel case can be seen in the African dent corn they were selling in the Seed Zoo as Volta white. While MOSTLY white, you WOULD get the occasional yellow or purple kernel (that is what actually allowed me to try and find pictures of the corn online, it seems to be the ONLY traditional corn in Ghana that does this. It's considered a somewhat dated variety, but well loved by some there (considering I saw one person style his ornamental coffin like an ear of it.)