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

[Blue-Jay]

@heirloomgal

This is exactly what she wrote.

Looking for something really interesting pod wise; no stripes; but an interesting colour – a snap is best and a pole or bush bean will be fine.

 

[heirloomgal]

@heirloomgal

This is exactly what she wrote.

Looking for something really interesting pod wise; no stripes; but an interesting colour – a snap is best and a pole or bush bean will be fine.

In my garden this year, as far as colors go on snap pods, I found network bean Stibitz to be the most enchanting. That was just such a lovely bean.

 

[flowerbug]

i didn't plan on picking beans today, but after digging a large enough trench to bury the tomato plants and any other stuff i want to throw in there (i only got half way, the ground is so hard i was digging up hard chunks of clay - and this is one of my better gardens!) i decided to check the last few bean patches to see if there were enough dry pods to pick. yes there were and those purple pods were calling to me (they are easy to see when the leaves have all fallen), plus i also wanted to check the back patch to see if the beans are actually worth harvesting at all or not and there were enough dry beans in there to make a quick survey of sampling worth it. so more beans it is!

 

[heirloomgal]

Had a ton of fun snapping bean pictures today. It was my first 'real' day of attempting to do an adequate job of representing the 'bean mystique', lol! Being Saturday, I took my time and savoured chipping away at getting a good shot. I had to chase the sun around the dry room though! My table ended the day in a different place than where it started. Shadows started near the end, and I have DD's official confirmation that all those bean photos are suited only for the scrapyard, but there is only so much time in a day so I had to settle with shadows. I think I realized today that taking photos of year's end beans is probably my favorite part of the whole process - aside from picking out what to grow!

'Tega Gnocca'. For a dual use bean, the seeds are handsome. One plant survived. I got lucky! I find the colors quite captivating.

'Fesol Afartapobres'. I'm guessing from Spain? Oooh, voluptuous shade of purple. Is a later maturing bean, but the yield is high. I have absolutely zero recollection of what the seed I planted looked like, so I'm hoping this is right. All 4 plants produced the same seed type.

'Nigel'. Words cannot describe what I feel for this bean.

'Fumolet de Fonzaso'. Beans like this always make me think of snails for some reason, or little oceanic shelled creatures.

I realized when I poured the beans out for the pic that I hadn't separated out the cross in there; needless to say, this is Anakin Kuvali Giant with a friend. The blue-ish bean is the imposter, I'll pick them out before I label and store them. I did sort of like they way they bounced off each other, colourwise. Coincidentally, the cross I found in Stevenson's Black Eye this year also looks almost exactly like this one. What are the chances.

'Astrid'. Can't find any info on this bean yet, but it is a little gem. It didn't have a super duper great year, but I will try again to get better production.

'Yellow Annelino'. Love crescent shaped pods.

Took many more pics, will post in coming evenings.

 

[heirloomgal]

A momentous day today, all the beans are finally officially harvested from vines. The birch poles are chipped, gardens are mostly all hoed. Walking boards lifted, all vines and thus far shelled pods are shredded and spread back into the beds. It truly is the end of the bean year, from an outdoor perspective. Indoors, there are some flats with the years last beans drying up. Well, another year another harvest of wonderful new beans.

Back to pictures!

'Buxton Buckshot'. Such a little cutie!

'Grumbliai'. I shelled it quite some time ago now, and the stripe is still quite butterscotch. I assumed it would darken quickly, but it's actually holding with this shade.

Here's one that doesn't hold it's color - 'Pragerhoff' aka 'Slovenian Blue'! It's still a rather unique shade, but 'true blue' it no longer is once dried and slightly aged.

'San Bernardo Blue' aka 'Nonna Agnes', now this one really is blue. It was direct seeded, so it's a bit behind and most of the pods are still drying on cardboard but I'll be curious what the seeds all look like. It seems like a kind of cutshort, boxy type of seed, not one of those rounded, smooth types. I didn't grow this for awhile because I thought it was synonymous with 'Meerbarbe' (which I have), but now that I've tried it I'm not sure. There is some similarity, like the beige edges on some, and the square shape, but these seem more blue to me. I dunno, hard to say.

'Macia'. The colored area is not black as it seems in the photo, but a very dark shade of burgundy. Seeds are quite large, and the yield is very good considering the size. It had a bit of shade where I put it, but it did admirably nonetheless. A sophisticated bean .

'Enfant de coeur de Arnald-Aosta'. This was a really lovely bean, almost no culls. Large, smooth, well formed seeds, early enough maturity. Pods get almost white as they dry down, and they have genes for resistance to pathogens because they stayed really blonde when fully dry. Lots of dried pods this year had brown spots on them.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Tonight will likely be our first frost as we have a freeze warning for tonight and Wednesday overnight into Thursday morning. The 2024 bean season will be over here in northern Illinois.

 

[heirloomgal]

What good luck I had today, my my my. The first pod on the Nigel bean plant cross dried, the single plant that had a semi-runner habit. There was zero bees this summer, not until about 2 weeks ago, so I wasn't too worried about a cross between the semi plant and the little bushes. It was a wild card of course what could have been in those pods, and the lady I got Nigel from - I have no idea what she grew it with. I expected black seed, or something marbled, because if I do see a cross that's often what it'll look like. My expectations were low, though my miniscule hope was that it might still look like Nigel, but be a semi-runner growth type instead of a bush. And it is!

 

[heirloomgal]

I can't believe how much I've learned about bean growing since I joined this group. I would never have guessed that green podded beans could be picked to dry indoors and still successfully dry down, let alone mature any good seeds. My runner beans were such a fail this year, but at the last moment they put out a modest number of pods, so I picked them a few days ago to try and dry them like I do the late P. vulgaris pods. Given the size of runner bean seeds, it didn't seem likely to me that this could work as well with runners, and they're still rather immature - but nothing ventured, nothing gained and I'd lose them all to frost if I didn't pick them anyway (finally had a killing frost last night). By golly, it seems to be working. Broke open my first dry pod yesterday, seeds were perfect. I'm quite thrilled about this development. I only had 8 seeds to begin with, so if even half of these pods have good seeds I'm ahead from where I started.

 

[ruralmamma]

Our season is practically over. Happy to say I did manage to get some mature pods off of the one that took months to bloom and pulled pods off of the black coat runners beans in hopes that I'll get some viable seed.

I'll be planting garlic and mulching the beds as I can but I neglected a sprain for far too long and am facing a bit of down time soon. Luckily I have lots of pretty bean seed to sort and keep me occupied.

 

[heirloomgal]

Our season is practically over. Happy to say I did manage to get some mature pods off of the one that took months to bloom and pulled pods off of the black coat runners beans in hopes that I'll get some viable seed.

I'll be planting garlic and mulching the beds as I can but I neglected a sprain for far too long and am facing a bit of down time soon. Luckily I have lots of pretty bean seed to sort and keep me occupied.

Black Coat runner beans! I've always wanted to grow those! I have seed for them, but they're in a rotation plan because of cross pollination. Are the flowers all bright red?