2026 Little Easy Bean Network – Plant A Garden, Water Your Soul, Join Our Family

[Blue-Jay]

Over the weekend I was feeling a little bumbed out. I spent a number of days taking bean photos in January and this month of February with my phones camera. I had used a 2003 era Canon PowerShot G3 4 mega pixel for all my website and photos posted here for years. Even when the orignal camera purchased new stopped working about 10 years later I found a supply of decently working PowerShot G3's on ebay. However in the last three or 4 months I threw away about 4 of these camera's from Ebay realizing that all the PowerShot G3's sold these days are all junk. So I thought the phone camera would do the job. Then I saw the phone camera was picking up my light gray background I use for the bean photos was being rendered as tan. I thought well I will use my photo shop to change the background color. I had done it before on images with great success. I found there must be something about the phone images that don't always look decent changing the background color. So now what do I do. Half the beans I photoed have been recorded on my freezer list, packed and put away in the freezer. Sunday I bought a new Canon camera. I hadn't bought a new camera in 23 years. I got caught up on my orders Saturday and fiddled with the Camera all the rest of the day Sunday after purchasing the camera in the late morning. So some of my Bean show is going to be photos with a tan background and the beans images themselves sometimes are not quite as sharp and bright as photos from a regular camera. I probably won't have time to take all those beans out of the freezer and redo their photos. Orders could come pouring in again and some big ones sometimes that take a lot of time to fill. I hope the photos are presentable. Half the 2025 crop is still sitting in Jars in my living room. The new beans that are going to be put on my website I am going to have to rephoto them. They need to decently match the gray background of all the images I have now on my website. So maybe later on like early March my bean show will start coming through with better photos. I not appologizing for slightly crumby photos. It's just that it makes me sick that I can't abide by my own standards this time around.

So today I am going to start my Big Bean Show dealing out the photos of varieties a bit each day. Hope this will be fairly fun. It's going to be what it is going to be.

 

[heirloomgal]

Over the weekend I was feeling a little bumbed out. I spent a number of days taking bean photos in January and this month of February with my phones camera. I had used a 2003 era Canon PowerShot G3 4 mega pixel for all my website and photos posted here for years. Even when the orignal camera purchased new stopped working about 10 years later I found a supply of decently working PowerShot G3's on ebay. However in the last three or 4 months I threw away about 4 of these camera's from Ebay realizing that all the PowerShot G3's sold these days are all junk. So I thought the phone camera would do the job. Then I saw the phone camera was picking up my light gray background I use for the bean photos was being rendered as tan. I thought well I will use my photo shop to change the background color. I had done it before on images with great success. I found there must be something about the phone images that don't always look decent changing the background color. So now what do I do. Half the beans I photoed have been recorded on my freezer list, packed and put away in the freezer. Sunday I bought a new Canon camera. I hadn't bought a new camera in 23 years. I got caught up on my orders Saturday and fiddled with the Camera all the rest of the day Sunday after purchasing the camera in the late morning. So some of my Bean show is going to be photos with a tan background and the beans images themselves sometimes are not quite as sharp and bright as photos from a regular camera. I probably won't have time to take all those beans out of the freezer and redo their photos. Orders could come pouring in again and some big ones sometimes that take a lot of time to fill. I hope the photos are presentable. Half the 2025 crop is still sitting in Jars in my living room. The new beans that are going to be put on my website I am going to have to rephoto them. They need to decently match the gray background of all the images I have now on my website. So maybe later on like early March my bean show will start coming through with better photos. I not appologizing for slightly crumby photos. It's just that it makes me sick that I can't abide by my own standards this time around.

So today I am going to start my Big Bean Show dealing out the photos of varieties a bit each day. Hope this will be fairly fun. It's going to be what it is going to be.

Have you checked out the photo settings in the phone @Blue-Jay ? There might be various light settings, or even a brightness adjuster in the photo gallery settings?

I was actually on your website last night @Blue-Jay because I'm going to purchase some beans this year I think instead of do network beans, I'm not 100% decided yet because I am still sending back a few network beans this fall - ones that I didn't get enough back to send in 2025. So, I'm sending network beans back anyway and we did have total success with getting network beans back to you this year. But anyway, not sure where I am with that yet but I wanted to mention that I noticed the 'out to grower' Batumi Georgia bean on there.

That was a bean you sent to me in 2024, here is where we are with that bean. In 2024 I planted 4 seeds in 4 pots, none sprouted. In 2025, same thing. None of the beans showed any sign of germination at all. There are 4 seeds left as of now, and I wonder if I should send them back to you in the fall with the network bean returns? I don't feel like those 4 will sprout for me and you have more experience & probably techniques with stubborn seeds like this. And I don't want to be the one to lose those last 4 beans on you! This is the only network bean that has failed to grow, every single other variety has had very good germination so I have no idea what is going on with these seeds?

 

[flowerbug]

Purple Dove was like that for me. And while I really like that bean, I'm not crazy about that type of growth. I wound up sticking in a bamboo pole next to the longest plant and tying it to the stick, and it still refused to wrap itself on there.

i don't worry about it too much here. i don't really consider Purple Dove to have the sprawl habit as it doesn't get beyond a few feet tall and most of the pods are not hitting the dirt. i also have pretty tough conditions and a lot of Japanese Beetle feasting going on and so far PD keep producing enough that they are worth my efforts - they are survivors.

i also have plenty of projects with them to keep working on too. it's going ok.

 

[flowerbug]

Have you checked out the photo settings in the phone @Blue-Jay ? There might be various light settings, or even a brightness adjuster in the photo gallery settings?

first of all get your light consistent and then check white balance and see how that looks and then go from there.

however, i have a hard time getting what i consider decent bean pictures. i had a friend with a very good camera set up take some of my beans to get pictures with and he decided to give up as it wasn't working for him either.

if you have a color card like this it can help show if your camera is doing what it should:

there are programs like GIMP that can be used to correct colors if they're off.

 

[Blue-Jay]

That was a bean you sent to me in 2024, here is where we are with that bean. In 2024 I planted 4 seeds in 4 pots, none sprouted. In 2025, same thing. None of the beans showed any sign of germination at all. There are 4 seeds left as of now, and I wonder if I should send them back to you in the fall with the network bean returns? I don't feel like those 4 will sprout for me and you have more experience & probably techniques with stubborn seeds like this. And I don't want to be the one to lose those last 4 beans on you! This is the only network bean that has failed to grow, every single other variety has had very good germination so I have no idea what is going on with these seeds?

heirloogal, don't send that seed back to me as I'm not going to be any better at trying to get them to grow than you. However now I know what happened to it. Many of these Simcox beans sat in the basement of a lady who knows Joe. They sat for several years and who knows how old they were when Joes sister Susan sent them down to this woman. Once in a while we are bound to run into some of these Simcox beans that probably are just not going to germinate. I took the whole load that was sitting there a few years ago and I did germintation tests on the whole 30 pound bag of beans. I found 35 of them that wouldn't grow at all. Threw those 35 all in the garbage. What can you do? Who knows how old some of those beans could have been when Joe brought them back from overseas.

 

[Blue-Jay]

I've taken a couple experimanteal photos with the new camera and it looks good. I've ordered a cable that will allow me to hook the camera up to my desk top and I have downloaded the app from Canon for this camera. I'm not going to play around with the camera on the phone. It did seem though that sometimes the color of the bean would influence how the photo rendered the background.