2022 Little Easy Bean Network - We Are Beans Without Borders

[meadow]

Guys!! @Bluejay77 & @heirloomgal

Turns out Fiesta is originally from Sweet Rock Farm in British Columbia and they have it in stock! Their description of Miko's Mixed Bush Bean tells how Fiesta came to be:

I’ve always encouraged my children to have their own garden where they can plant what they want. My youngest son Miko started growing beans in his patch of garden when he was eight, mixing yellows, greens, whatever he got his hands on. He is well into his teens now and he plants a 100’ bed of “his” beans every year saving the seed. Each year he evaluates the patch, adds something or another, and keeps tweaking it. A few years ago, after harvesting the seed he showed me a large raspberry mottled bean that he didn’t plant. We separated it and grew out this chance cross on its own. The result is “Fiesta”, another bean we have on offer here.

 

[heirloomgal]

Guys!! @Bluejay77 & @heirloomgal

Turns out Fiesta is originally from Sweet Rock Farm in British Columbia and they have it in stock! Their description of Miko's Mixed Bush Bean tells how Fiesta came to be:

Wow @meadow! I've said it before, but I'll say it again, you are an awesome detective! I've never even heard of this place! Thank you!

 

[meadow]

I've been to many, many seed saving events with Leigh, and I can send you some of her Johnson beans if you want to do a side by side trial with Gross Brothers. I believe Gross Brothers is at network bean too. Leigh has fallen off the seed saving radar in the last few years, but I grow her Johnson, Littleton, and Smith's Vermont Cranberry on a rotation, and Dolloff sometimes. Dolloff is a nice bean but enough other people grow it that I don't always give it space in my own gardens.

PM sent!

 

[Zeedman]

The gardens were dry enough (almost ) for me to walk without making mud cakes, so I was able to get in to pick, and check on things. Still quite a few snap beans on Emerite, which is re-sprouting & forming new pods from the base. The long bean trial is still producing fairly well too... but the now-resident rabbit (hiding somewhere in the garden) is nipping off a lot of the ones closest to the ground. I'm not as angry about that as I might have been in years past, it's been a good enough year to share - so no wabbit hunt.

And after picking the snap beans, I walked down the row past the Gigandes runner beans - and found half a dozen dry pods! A good sign, since I planted nearly all of my stock. The pole wax bean Zlatak has begun drying down pods too, and I picked the first dry pods from the Washday Pea cowpea today as well. I'm truly surprised that 2 straight days of rain didn't appear to damage any of the drying seed; the Zlatak beans expanded to split some of their pods, but didn't sprout.

Gigandes runner bean (left), Zlatak pole wax (right)


Washday Pea cowpea


The ?Atlas? bush bean is almost done. Not a bad yield, in spite of burning up half the row. The photo on the right shows the shellies.

The pole snap Grandma Gina is showing signs that some pods are approaching maturity, so with maybe 3 more weeks before the freeze there should be at least some dry seed. After @heirloomgal 's comment on how slow the pods were to dry down, I grew them against the South wall of my pole building for extra heat, and that seems to be helping. Uzice looks close to ripening en masse. No sign of ripening yet from Bird Egg #3 or Madagascar lima; maybe the first night in the 40's will kick them into overdrive.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Wow @meadow! I've said it before, but I'll say it again, you are an awesome detective! I've never even heard of this place! Thank you!

Wow that was fantastic dective work on the @meadow 's part. I googled Fiesta beans yesterday and all I got was images of canned beans and a recipe for Easy Fiesta beans. Maybe that's because I live to faraway from the source. @meadow is pretty close to the source company. Same thing happens when I listen to Pandora radio on the internet when I visit my friend in Florida. When some new tunes comes up that Pandora is presenting to me I get artists from Tampa and other areas around Florida that I have never heard on Pandora here in the Chicago area.

Are you going to order some of those @heirloomgal and put one packet in a cassette shipment? I bet you are. I can't get over how those beans look so much like Candy except being a bush. Like I've always said when people want me to identify a bean just by looking at the seed coat. I tell them bean seed coat colors and patterns are very repeatable.

 

[meadow]

The air here feels so cool and moist; reminds me of Santa Cruz near the beach. Each day it has said there would be sun in the afternoon but it hasn't happened yet.

Dutch Bullet had some dry pods... no, wait a second, I'd call them 'brown' pods; all of the pods, even the ones under cover, have softened. Anyway, brought the 'brown' Dutch Bullet pods into the house and hung the little organza bags in front of a big fan -- I swear it looks like a Martha Stewart bean mobile blowing in the wind! HA!

 

[heirloomgal]

Isn't it incredible how you can have some pods drying under cover that are at the crispy or nearly crispy phase and if high humidity arrives, say it rains, even though the bean pods are totally protected they will temporarily go very 'soft' again! Fans work SO well at wicking moisture from bean pods. Never underestimate the power of an overhead stove vent too! Right now I have a screen window mesh propped up on a bucket under my range hood, fan on high, and bean pods spread all across it. Works wonders even overnight!

The air here feels so cool and moist; reminds me of Santa Cruz near the beach. Each day it has said there would be sun in the afternoon but it hasn't happened yet.

Dutch Bullet had some dry pods... no, wait a second, I'd call them 'brown' pods; all of the pods, even the ones under cover, have softened. Anyway, brought the 'brown' Dutch Bullet pods into the house and hung the little organza bags in front of a big fan -- I swear it looks like a Martha Stewart bean mobile blowing in the wind! HA!

 

[heirloomgal]

Having some great fun collecting & shelling some of the dried, later maturing pole pods trickling in.

Given how much mental energy I divert *worrying* about how well everything is doing (especially network beans!!!) during July and August, it's a HUGE relief to start counting the eggs in the proverbial basket.

One thing I think I've observed this year is that getting the nearly mature, bulging pods (with formed beans inside) to dry more quickly is helped along by leaf removal. I did a few test patches here and there and in each place the pods in the pocket I opened up (on the poles) dried up rather quickly when exposed, while the rest under leaf cover stayed soft. @Bluejay77 ''s trick of cutting the vines at ground level works quite well too.

Found these pods today while picking through the rows; it's raining tonight and apparently will rain tomorrow too. Had to make decisions about what poles to pull and hide away, which to leave in place, and which ones to leave in place but cut the vines at the ground.....Used a ladder to go around picking pods in the pole tops.

Armenian Giant Black. @Zeedman I think you'd really like this bean, given that you seem to enjoy growing large seeded varieties. This is a fantastic bean for so many reasons, but it's health and production were outstanding. Probably excellent for snaps, shellies and dried.

Gold of Bacau. Lots of big pods this year!

Garafol Oro. If the pod was straight, it would probably hit the 10 inch mark. Actually, this one is quite similar to Armenian GB in several ways, though seed colours are very different.

Vulkan

Yay! My first lima beans, EVER!

Coco de Belle Ile. This bean is 2-3 per pod for me! But what it lacks in generosity, it makes up for in beauty indeed.

Fukuruyu Chanaga pods. Nice looking for a dried pod.

Schafermadle Has those necklace, tighter than tight suction pods.

Grune aus des Karpaten.

 

[meadow]

Isn't it incredible how you can have some pods drying under cover that are at the crispy or nearly crispy phase and if high humidity arrives, say it rains, even though the bean pods are totally protected they will temporarily go very 'soft' again! Fans work SO well at wicking moisture from bean pods. Never underestimate the power of an overhead stove vent too! Right now I have a screen window mesh propped up on a bucket under my range hood, fan on high, and bean pods spread all across it. Works wonders even overnight!

Yeah, those Dutch Bullet pods crisped right up!

Those are some fine looking beans you've got there!

 

[Triffid]

One of the network beans I opted for this year was ‘Sallee Dunahoo Family White Greasy’.
As the plants grew they put on a wildly varied display of phenotypes, including a bush bean, long-podded McCaslan look-alike, small flat-podded type and a greasy cut-short. The crop was so diverse that I thought it would have been very odd indeed for any gardener to grow and save these together, without selection. So, what really happened to these beans?I had to find out…

I was able to find the name of the originator in a thread from 2013 - a user named MarshallSmyth had requested the beans from Janice Dunnahoo, née Sallee, c. 2010.
Fortunately, after a little detective work I managed to find Janice Dunnahoo’s contact information, and she responded! Here’s what I learned:

• The family bean is not a mix. It is exclusively a greasy cut-short with plump squarish white seeds.

• They were passed down matrilineally, by the Napier and Combs family, and have nothing to do with her father’s or husband’s families (Sallee & Dunnahoo). She comments that they should be named the Napier-Combs Family Greasy or something to that effect.

• The other types of bean in the ‘Sallee Dunahoo’ mixture are likely to be seeds from Amish markets that Janice picked up in Kentucky on the same trip where she collected the family greasy cut-short beans. But she didn’t mix them together before she sent them to MarshallSmyth, and is unsure how they ended up that way.

It is a weird turn of events and it illustrates that ‘Sallee Dunahoo Family White Greasy’ doesn’t really exist as a variety, named after families that never grew it and mixed up with other beans that were never grown with it.

Janice and her cousin in Kentucky have very generously offered me some pure seeds of their Napier-Combs family heirloom, from this year’s crop. @Bluejay77 Russ, I let her know that you would most likely be interested in some seeds, too. With your permission may I let her know your email address so she can contact you directly?

If the greasy cut-shorts that I grew this year are the same as the true family strain, then they really have an outstanding heirloom. It’s early and delicious. The green pods are so packed with beans that they burst apart as you pick them if you aren’t careful. Ripe pods beginning to dry by late August when many other greasies are just beginning to flower here.



Below are some of the mature pods of multiple types discovered in the mix. The leftmost row of pods are the ones Janice claims to be closest to the family heirloom.