Nuna Beans

[Alan]

Dave (american Gardener) was kind enough to send me several varieties of these beautiful little South American beans to trial, unfortunately it appears that they are daylight sensitive, however they can cross with common garden beans leading to a short season and less photosensitive Nuna bean. We will grow these in pots and move them to the greenhouse where we will cross them with bush beans and pole beans this coming fall.

For those who don't know what a nuna bean is, they look like an ordinary bean and come in many colors, however they differentiate in that they are used for "popping" much like popcorn. Having a taste that is said to be comparable to peanuts and a texture like that of popcorn.

Commercial breeders have bred and tried to copyright the Nuna bean in the past to be used for commercial production, however the indegiounous folks of their home region prevented such a think from happening to their traditional and public domain crops thankfully.

They are on the same list with other Andean/Peruvian crops which have been pirated by commercial breeders in recent years due to their medicinal properties including:

Salvia Divinorum (Oxacan Origin)
Kculli/Kulli purple corn
Maca
Oca
Yacone
Ullocos
Ayahusca
Here are a couple of articles I found on the net referencing this bio-piracy, out and out, that is all it can be called, the rape and pillage of a particular cultures historic food and medicinal crops:

naturalscience.com/ns/news/news38.html

www.new-ag.info/02-5/develop/dev03.html

[americangardener]

Sounds like you have some big plans for those nunas alan. Sure hope you can get these to cross with some non-photosensitive varieties. I think i may even attempt some myself. I have a few regular vulgaris types in mind already. I'll have to wait till i see what the plants growth habits are like to know which ones i'll use for sure.

But, it ought to be an interesting experiment.

Dave

[orflo]

I have a friend who has done some crossings in Spain, but I think he was to busy to grow out the seeds...I'll ask if he still has some of it...You can make them flower earlier, by reducing daylength artificially , throwing a dark plastic or big piece of cardboard or.. over the nunas and reducing daylenth to about ten hours or even less, this might work...But I'm not sure if they will react quickly, I think I'll try it myself this year. This crop is just too interesting to be left unexplored...

[americangardener]

Yeah.. i thought of trying to do some covering out in the field. I still might. But, what i'm thinking now is i'll plant a few of each variety in some 6 inch pots and then bring them indoors and set up a grow room where i can better control the light situation. I'll be using flourescent lamps and a light proof enclosure. I've done it before with other plants.. different kind of course. But, those would usually go into flowering mode within about two weeks of 12/12 light - dark cycles. Then i'll just have to figure out how to bring the pollen in for the crosses. I'll probably just pick whatever blossoms off the outside plants and bring the whole flowers indoors to use for the crossing.

Now, i guess i'll need to figure out the amount of darkness they'll respond to best. Maybe I will try starting with 14 hours.. I can't recall what the difference in darkness makes on the flowering.. but i know there is some reason why i wouldn't want to have any more than needed. I just can't remember what the reason was. Either way i'll only need to be concerned with getting one crop of pods out of it.. so maybe i'll begin with 14 hours dark for two weeks or so and then bump it up to 12 after they set blossoms.

Should be fun experimenting though... Now look what you started Alan.

Dave

[bunkie]

really fascinating alan! i wonder if the plants could be grown in the shade, or partial shade for effectiveness?