2024 Little Easy Bean Network - Growing Heirloom Beans Of Today And Tomorrow

[flowerbug]

I'm quite envious. I haven't had anything to shell in weeks. I used to have bags to last me through the winter. Since retirement, I keep up with stuff better and consequently have no beans to keep my hands occupied in front of the T.V.

i was being too quick with my writing. what i should have said was "sorted" and not "shelled". i do have all the beans shelled out as of a few weeks ago. i also have most of them sorted but there remains a few pounds of mostly Purple Dove beans that i need to get through before i can get to the Great Combining stage and then pictures after that. i was way overscheduled for the holiday weeks and had some things come up that needed to be dealt with right away so whatever plans i had for sorting got sidetracked.

 

[flowerbug]

A bit of a let-down, I was expecting gigantic furry things with a tusk or two.

that seems normal for a triffid...

 

[Blue-Jay]

Tennessee Mountain Climber - Pole Snap. Left Photo. It was given to me at the 2022 Pikeville, Kentucky seed swap. I wonder if the bean is stringless. This years grower is from Mason, Michigan

Tunny - Pole Dry. Photo right. I acquired this beautiful bean from Beans And Herbs in the UK. My spreadsheet says November 2019. I can't believe I've had the bean that long already. This years grower is from De Soto, Wisconsin.


Tennessee Mountain Climber................................Tunny

 

[Blue-Jay]

Van Gogh's Olive - Semi Runner Dry. Left Photo. This bean was probably named by Joesph Simcox who collected the bean somewhere overseas. The inspiration for the name to me obviously comes from the painter Van Gogh and his paintings of olive trees. The bean itself is productive. This years growers is from Pella, Iowa.


Veitch's Climbing - Pole Dry. Right Photo. A beautiful seed from Beans And Herbs in the UK. I have searched the internet for any history of the bean but can not actually find much of anything about the bean. I did run into one article on the bean and it is simply named "Veitch" by the author of the article. Same bean as this one the seed color and shape matched perfectly. The Article is on a blog site called Mark's Veg Plot. If you click on the authors name Mark Willis you will find all kinds of blogs written by other people. This years grower is from Auburn, Indiana.


Van Gogh's Olive...............................................Veitch's Climbing

 

[ruralmamma]

I have a couple of questions and thought I'd ask here instead of the 2025 thread.

I'm hoping to begin sorting my 2024 seed and distributing some to gardening friends both here and online as well as donating a fair amount to our local seed library. I generally try to save enough for two plantings of each variety in the event that something would happen to the first planting. I keep my seed labeled by year and have saved seed going back to 2020 and try to plant the older seed first. Probably 75% of my seeds are common or at least replaceable but some are a bit harder to find. Do any of you keep a backup supply? I'm seriously considering putting a supply of my harder to find and local gems in my parent's freezer just in case.

My second question concerns support structures. I have cattle panel arches which have performed wonderfully and of course have used teepees with varying success as we get quite a bit of wind on this hilltop. My crowning achievement was the tent structure made from discarded sign post. The problem is that each side is contained within the edge of a bed and when those beans are flourishing, getting to anything on that side of the bed is a challenge. My original plan was to simply move it to a different area away from the beds and expand it a bit more since we recently found more of the sign post when we tore down an outbuilding. Now I'm wondering if it would be better to simply rebuild it as a vertical trellis. Photo is after I replaced the strings for a later crop.

 

[Blue-Jay]

I'm seriously considering putting a supply of my harder to find and local gems in my parent's freezer just in case.

I would highly recommend anyone who starts to develop a seed collection that can not be regrown every 5 years should have freezer space for seed. When collections get big enough it's sometime easy to forget about a cultivar and lose it to age.

 

[Blue-Jay]

I have cattle panel arches which have performed wonderfully

Do you have photos of your cattle panel arches when they are up and installed in your garden. It would be interesting to see that.

 

[ruralmamma]

Here's the ones I put up late last spring when I started the garden expansion. They were moved from another part of the property and aren't perfect but even with extreme drought they were covered with beans and a couple of cucumber plants I didn't have high hopes for. I have another arch in my other garden where I generally grow cutshorts and cut another damaged panel in half and grow half-runners and any bean that vines less than 6'.

 

[Neen5MI]

Tennessee Mountain Climber - Pole Snap. Left Photo. It was given to me at the 2022 Pikeville, Kentucky seed swap. I wonder if the bean is stringless. This years grower is from Mason, Michigan



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Tennessee Mountain Climber................................

I can't comment on stringless. I didn't eat any fresh. I can say, these beans were the earliest to mature of all the varieties I grew, by a significant margin. Once I'd harvested the main flush of dried pods, the vines continued to produce a slow trickle of pods, enormous at the stage just before beginning to dry. Growing adjacent to the goat pen, I'd grab a handful of the succulent pods while doing any number of gardening tasks and feed them through the chainlink. The goats definitely approve!

 

[Zeedman]

Well, the photo below is my entire 2024 dry bean crop. It actually amazed me to get anything at all, given that the weather & other factors prevented me from planting until mid-July.

Clockwise from upper left: "Murasaki" adzuki; "Woods Mountain Crazy Bean" (bush bean); "Yancheng Bush" yardlong bean; "Giant Red Tarka" bush bean.

"Woods Mountain" was the silver lining in an otherwise disappointing year, since my seed was getting old & the entire planting last year died before seed had matured. It surprised me this year, in responding to the late planting by accelerating its normally long DTM, for a very quick first flush. A strong 2nd flush also ripened, due to the exceptionally late frost

"Giant Red Tarka" proved its worth again, as a good short-DTM shelly bean; it's on my short list as a 'keeper'. And the "Yancheng Bush" yardlong (really more of a footlong ) produced so heavily I was able to give away several rounds to my Filipino friends.

The "Murasaki" adzuki was a shocker, because (a) it came up as several volunteers in late July, and (b) it has always required my entire growing season. It flowered much earlier than usual, then stopped growing, and focused all of its energy on ripening a smaller pod set. Not much seed, but those few are very high quality.

The "Madagascar" limas set a lot of pods, but didn't have time to ripen. Neither did the "Gigandes" runner beans; but thanks to the late frost, I harvested a nice bowl of shellies, and a couple pickings of snaps.

The pole hyacinth bean 'Early Meaty" was a big surprise, in that it bloomed early, and set tons of pods. Some of those came very close to maturing, and the vines stayed in bloom until frost, long after all other beans had given up for the year. The day-neutral hyacinth beans continue to astonish me, with how quickly they bloom here. I'll post photos when I've got time to hunt them down.