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Post by mskrieger on Jul 29, 2014 12:20:22 GMT -5
Our summer has been absolutely beautiful. A touch cooler than usual, which is great. 80F degree days, nights in the 60sF, sunny with occasional rain, just enough that the garden doesn't really need to be irrigated. We've had only a few isolated episodes of heat and humidity, just a couple days here and there. Everything is really, really happy. Harvesting yard-long beans that are 20" long, fennel, carrots, scallions, beet greens. Hopefully some tomatoes and zucchini starting next week.
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Post by mskrieger on Jul 25, 2014 12:35:47 GMT -5
Steev,
The hay bale and leaf technique works well for anything that suffers from wind and repeated freeze-thaw cycles. People around here often use it to get fig trees and other marginally hardy perennials through the winter. It also works well to keep kale fresh and edible in the ground, and to prevent the ground from freezing. If you've buried root vegetables or cabbage in a clamp, for instance, and the ground typically freezes 15" deep, the extra layer of leaves/hay can prevent the veggies from freezing. Even if it doesn't prevent freezing, it keeps them frozen until uncovered...which can help a lot in February and March, when the sun gets stronger but the nights stay freezing.
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Post by mskrieger on Jul 24, 2014 9:25:29 GMT -5
hi RichardW, I'm glad to hear of your success! South Island New Zealand is a chilly Maritime climate, right? It sounds like your extremes are right around the edges of what favas can endure. In my experience, even temperature differences that look small on paper can amount to dramatically different gardening possibilities.
I am curious about your extra cold resistant favas, though. How far apart do you plant them? Would they repeatedly yield enough to feed a family of four a nice fava dish if you planted them closely in a 1x3 meter bed? (I'm envisioning something that could be surrounded by straw bales and filled with leaves, enough to insulate the favas during the worst of the winter...) From my experience in DC, the favas will set pods in early May if they overwinter. That might make them worth it, here.
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Post by mskrieger on Jul 24, 2014 9:08:49 GMT -5
You guys have all made interesting comments. It's too early to say whether this batch of seed is all bad--I saved from a whole bunch of plants and mixed it together (because I am just not anal retentive enough to label every bean's produce individually). The only criteria was "two pods from a flower".
This oddball plant is the only one that has fruited yet--the others are just beginning to flower. Beautiful purple flowers that open in the morning, close by afternoon.
I inspected another one of the odd beans...the peas inside look like typical immature yard long bean seeds--like green black-eyed peas but a touch more elongated and flattened than black eyed peas would be. And they are well spread in the pod with pod flesh between them, not crowded like 'crowder peas'. I wonder if this bean just had a random mutation in something that controls pod shape and skin texture.
I too have heard the word that the Fabaceae family are all inbreeders, easy to save seed from, etc. But since fava beans and garbanzos have shown that to be untrue in a pollinator-rich North American garden, I'm starting to wonder about V. unguiculata too. Blue Adzuki, it sounds like you got an awful lot of variation from just one sample of seed you picked up in a Chinese market--am I reading you right? That seems kind of crazy unless V. unguiculata does outcross quite a bit and the farmer was growing more than one variety and relies on professional breeders for seed. Hm. I wish I knew some yardlong bean farmers. No one here grows them commercially, I think it's a daylength issue. Johnny's Selected specifies that the Gita and Red Noodle varieties it sells are specifically selected to perform well in the temperate daylengths. Johnny's also claims the beans grow 16-20". I rarely get 16", 12" is more like it (though still impressive. And it may be because I grow them without irrigation.)
In a week or two I'll have pods from the other plants that are just starting to flower and I'll let you know what I find!
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Post by mskrieger on Jul 23, 2014 9:12:43 GMT -5
Bean diseases and devastating bean beetle predation are pretty common around here, so I grow yard-long beans as a green bean. They're a different genus entirely (Vigna) and seem unattractive to both the insects and diseases around here. They also do fine without irrigation in my climate (we get 3-4 inches of rain per month in the summer, with daytime temps in the 80s-90sF (27-38C). And they are mighty tasty.
The variety I'd been growing was Gita, purchased from Johnny's Selected Seeds in 2012. I noticed that some plants grew just one bean from each flower, and some grew two beans. Appeared identical in all other respects. I liked the idea of doubling my beans for the same number of plants, so I decided to save seed from the double-podded plants and grow them out in another part of the property. I don't know how outbreeding V. unguiculata is under my conditions, but I have plenty of pollinator pressure and wanted to provide some isolation.
This is my first season growing them out...I suppose you could call it the F1 generation, though I did no intentional crosses. Already things are getting weird. I had one plant that bloomed two weeks before the others (early--good) but its beans are nothing like what I expected. Only a single pod grows from each flower. The beans are short, about the size and look of Phaseolus vulgaris (common bean), develop peas much faster than Gita, have short bristly hairs on the outside of the pods that give them an unpleasant velvet-bristle texture, and they don't taste as good as yard-longs usually do.
I did include seed from one, unusually long single-podded plant, because it had super long pods and that was a trait I liked and wanted to preserve. Could that odd man out have been an unintentional cross in the foundation seed? Or could it be that Gita itself is actually a hybrid (even though Johnny's doesn't mark it as F1, and they are normally good about that kind of thing) and weird things are segregating out in what is effectively an F2 generation? Or does V. unguiculata naturally have quite a bit of variability in it? (This is my first time growing out my own seed from this species, so I have nothing to use as comparison.)
All thoughts, ideas and wild speculation are eagerly appreciated!
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Post by mskrieger on Jul 21, 2014 18:29:32 GMT -5
Good to hear about the heat and drought-tolerant fava experiments...I look forward to hearing more good news. I'm surprised that they don't grow better in a Southwestern winter...but perhaps it gets too cold in the winter where you are, flowerweaver?
This spring, when I finally decided to give up on my fava quest, I did have a few plants still flowering and setting pods on 1 July, when I pulled them all. They were from the Ianto's Return mix I obtained from Adaptive Seeds in 2013. I considered keeping them, but they were just so wimpy and miserable compared to the pictures of favas I have seen in climates that suit them...I decided it wasn't worth the effort, as this was an unusually cold spring. But if you haven't dipped into the Ianto's Return gene pool, you might find something of worth.
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Post by mskrieger on Jul 21, 2014 7:39:00 GMT -5
My first post, and rather late to this party, too, but growing favas in the Northeastern US has been my obsession and I wanted to share my experience in case it was useful to anyone:
1. I used to have a plot in a community garden in Washington, DC (zone 7a, temperate climate with cool-to-cold, sometimes snowy winters and hot, humid summers). I tried planting the favas in late October one year. They germinated quickly and grew like Jack's Beanstalk for about a month, when it got too cold and dark to grow. They stood all winter until late February, when two weeks of wind and temperatures in the teens Fahrenheit (about -10C) did all of them in except for a few lucky dwarfs who were covered by a drift of leaves. They survived and made few pods, but plotzed in early May when the heat started. Tasty enough to whet my appetite, so...
2. For the past 3 years in southern Connecticut (zone 6b, similar to DC but colder in winter and more humane in summer), I've tried to grow them. What I've learned: Favas don't like New England. They winterkill without exception in even an average winter (lows only 0F. Snow cover or none, doesn't matter.) If chitted and spring planted in early March, they take between 1-5 (yes, 5!) weeks to germinate depending on the soil temperature. They then grow fine until the temperature starts hitting 80F (26C) during the day. This can happen anytime between mid-May and late-June in an average year. But even in this extraordinarily cool spring, the earliest plants didn't set pods until June 1 and they were already turning black and spitting blood (to paraphrase Steev from another thread.)
From my experience, favas are long-season plants that like cool, predictable weather. Weather like a Mediterranean or Maritime winter. In places like the northern US, where we have all 4 seasons and temperatures swing from 15F (-10C) to 80F(26C)+ in 3 months, they just don't have time to grow to their full potential and they're a waste of space. I do know people in Maine who grow favas as a spring-summer crop; Maine very rarely gets daytime temperatures above 80F even in July, so it works. Would probably be a good summertime crop in Quebec and the Maritime provinces, too. Will Bonsall breeds favas in that climate, covered in a greenhouse to keep out pollinators. It works well for him.
Anybody who breeds a heat-tolerant fava (or a super-cold tolerant one!) please post about it!
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