The 2014 Little Easy Bean Network - Get New Beans On The Cheap

[897tgigvib]

@Bluejay77

Took this photo a few minutes ago. This is what I've been getting from what was a total of 5 plants of SHOSHONE old outcross.
4 of the plants are still putting out.

Notice the tricolor ones? beige with white and black.
There are 2 plants making 2 versions of dark pinto.
There is a mostly orange with beige.
And there is a Shoshone.

 

[897tgigvib]

It was 2 plants that made the shoshone type seed, but even those varied some. One of those 2 plants finished with good production and passed on mid August. I think it was the one with bigger shoshone seeds, with the powder color a bit darker.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Seed O I picked 4 AGB pods yesterday and found a bunch more of them yellowing. They are large beautiful black seeds. The seed that this plant came from I don't think it hard had what you call a seed coat. The seed was ugly. It grew though, and I was amazed. Hope our sunny warm spell we are in right now keeps going. That makes things look better for this bean all the time.

I thought I would keep a small sample of the seed to grow again here, but I will probably send you back the rest of the seed crop. I think the next time I grow AGB I thought about starting seedlings in little peat pots and get it going earlier before my normal planting time. Germinate them in the house and place them in sun during the day and bring them in at night. That would give AGB a head start on the season to mature seed and dry pods earlier in the season closer to the rest of my pole varieties.

It seems once AGB starts yellowing pods things begin moving a bit faster.

Pure black? I ask because the original original seed I started with (what I planted to get the "ugly" seed you wound up with.) had a smattering of tiny white spots on it (in fact that was how I spilt up the original packet; I got the spotted ones, the other person got the pure black ones), and I never figured out if they were part of the seed coat or some sort of damage.

 

[Blue-Jay]

It was 2 plants that made the shoshone type seed, but even those varied some. One of those 2 plants finished with good production and passed on mid August. I think it was the one with bigger shoshone seeds, with the powder color a bit darker.

Hi Marsh,

I get the same thing from Shoshone. Some darker and a lighter version of the same pattern. Maybe just a little genetic variablity. Thanks for the photo. A very colorful mix.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Pure black? I ask because the original original seed I started with (what I planted to get the "ugly" seed you wound up with.) had a smattering of tiny white spots on it (in fact that was how I spilt up the original packet; I got the spotted ones, the other person got the pure black ones), and I never figured out if they were part of the seed coat or some sort of damage.

Hey @Pulsegleaner,

The seeds are pure black. Anything else you saw in the seed might have been some slight defect in the seed coat. Some places on the seed coat might have been thiner and when the seed dried it looked lighter against the black background. That would be my take on it.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Talking about beans segregating into different seed coat colors. I had a first happen to me this summer. When I plant pole beans each variety gets planted around two poles with 4 seeds around each pole. Last year when I planted Prairie Patch. I think I got one segregated pattern, and the rest of them came back looking the seed I had put in the ground. Selected some seed from that harvest of Prairie Patch and planted again this year. Not a single seed I'm harvesting is Prairie Patch. Every single plant produced black seed. The beans I planted this spring did a disappearing act.

 

[897tgigvib]

Prairie Patch did a segregating for me also!

I got one plant that made original prairie patch looking seeds,
One plant that made nice white seeds,
and 2 plants that are making black seeds.

They all make familiar and similar pods that go tender crispy when dry, easy harvest to open, with 1 to 4 fair sized seeds per pod.
One of the black seeded plants makes pods that are more colorful, with purplishness well mixed in, not striped, but in shades of green to a deeper reddish purple. I'll save some seeds from that plant separately.

Prairie Patch segregated nicely. It'll be nice to have it in several versions...

Maybe with names such as:

White Prairie
True Prairie Patch
Black Prairie
and howzabout...
Woodstock Black Prairie

=====

I'm getting more worried about
Buxton Buckshot.
He only has a very few, but very pretty, little pods, and the vine portion carrying one of them bent in the drizzle of a rain we got and is dying back from the crease. I think the seeds in it might be far enough along, and there are 2 other small pretty pods. Buxton Buckshot is trying, but, well, there is still hope.

=====

A bit ago I finally picked some WHITE COCO African. The surviving plant is a 9 foot tall tender vining, (thin stems), pole bean, 5 months to first mature pods. Pods are nicely filled, and dry nicely, only barely 3' long.

Also picked another 27 Shoshone seeds this morning.
Yellow Jacket had a couple pods hiding for me to pick also.

That rain brought some few of those Aphids that mostly only infest Madrone trees to one of the Lima plants, but these aphids don't do much and they fail in my garden. These are easy to identify, larger, brown almost black, and they don't cluster as close together. Been squishing them, bleeyech!
But I may just remove those parts of that lima. The limas are about done anyway, what with this cooler weather.

Ganymede still wins the beauty contest of the limas!

 

[Blue-Jay]

Hi Marsh,

I think if you save and plant the Prairie Patch segregations and add to the Prairie Patch name that would be great. But I think the original Prairie Patch should still be called Priarie Patch. Otherwise if you change the name to True Prirarie Patch then there will be the same bean with two different names. Yes, No?

I believe I also got a white bean from Prairie Patch last year, but this year I decided to pursue the Black Turkey and the White bean from Black Turkey that I'm calling White Turkey. So White Turkey segregated a plant or two back into Black Turkey, and Black Turkey segregated a plant or two into White Turkey again. No other new combinations. I think these both might settle into stable patterns soon.

Yellow Jacket for me segregated a couple of plants to the solid yellow gold seed called Prinssese from which it came, and a couple of Borlotto seeds that was the male pollen contributor. Prinssese comes from Denmark.

I think Ganymede is likely to always win the beauty contest among limas.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Hey @Pulsegleaner,

The seeds are pure black. Anything else you saw in the seed might have been some slight defect in the seed coat. Some places on the seed coat might have been thiner and when the seed dried it looked lighter against the black background. That would be my take on it.

Actually, give that the white spots felt sort of raised, my guess was always some sort of scarring from insect damage (the only reason I was not sure is that I know of bean where the colored bits are sort of raised as well). The Ricters stuff is supposedly unregenrated (that is, the seen in you pack is the actual seed Joe collected in the market, not it's descendant) so damage of that sort might occur (I doubt it does anything to the edibility and therefore salability of the beans)

I managed to dig up the original picture Richters used for the bean so you can see what I meant (in case it happens again). One of them near the top has it (though what I saw was MUCH less extensive than that)

 

[Blue-Jay]

Actually, give that the white spots felt sort of raised, my guess was always some sort of scarring from insect damage (the only reason I was not sure is that I know of bean where the colored bits are sort of raised as well). The Ricters stuff is supposedly unregenrated (that is, the seen in you pack is the actual seed Joe collected in the market, not it's descendant) so damage of that sort might occur (I doubt it does anything to the edibility and therefore salability of the beans)

I managed to dig up the original picture Richters used for the bean so you can see what I meant (in case it happens again). One of them near the top has it (though what I saw was MUCH less extensive than that)

I think I saw this photo before. I really think that one seed has an imperfection in the development of it's seed coat which created those speckled looking marks. I think we will find that this is a solid black bean.