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Post by garnetmoth on Oct 18, 2011 9:47:03 GMT -5
Hey Extreme- that Dolloff looks awesome too- Have you gotten any feedback from folks in hotter states about how it does for them?
Found a thread about Dolloff on GW, and it looks like DarJones/Fusion Power has grown them in 7b and they did great for him. Ill write it in my search list for next year!.
Joseph- thats great to know about production! Dans Blue Victor gave me about 2 cups from maybe 10 plants. It was the most productive Vulgaris, and I ate some green (tenderette holds up to cooking better, but theres no flavor problem with BV, it just gets limp in a mix of other green bean types)
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Post by robertb on Oct 18, 2011 11:53:05 GMT -5
You don't need hummingbirds to set runners; they work perfectly well over here without a hummingbird to be found outside the nearest zoo. I'm not sure what does pollinate them - bumblebees bite a hole in the back of the flower, which messes things up for it - but something does.
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Post by spacecase0 on Oct 18, 2011 15:46:30 GMT -5
my runner beans made beans last year, but not this year,
birds never find my yard, bees seldom find my yard,
I took a brush out and hand pollinated them the first year...
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Post by Walk on Oct 19, 2011 10:07:37 GMT -5
We grow about 150 pints of dry beans and peas (measured by volume as we don't have a scale). Here's our varieties (plant numbers are approximate as some seeds don't germinate):
Pea - Amplissimo Viktoria Soup from Fedco Seeds. We refer to this variety as the "chick" pea as it cooks up like garbanzos which don't do at all well here. We make hummus, falafel, etc. with it. We get over 7.5 pints per 180 plants.
Bean Dry Bush - Cannellini from Fedco. Yield 11.5 pints/180 row feet. These don't do as well in a wet year.
Beans Dry Bush - King of the Early from Fedco. Yield 22.5 pints/210 row feet. Our best bush bean and good for all-round use.
Beans Dry Bush - Marfax from Fedco. Yield 13 pints/180 row feet. Not the best yield but the earliest. Makes great baked beans.
Bean Dry Bush - White Rice from MN-SJ-R O.S. Baker Creek. Trialed this year - yield 1.75 pints/20 row feet. Not the best yield and was a pain to shell. Will have to trial it in the kitchen to see if we keep it on or not.
Bean Dry Pole - Cherokee Trail of Tears from SSE: WI-MI-B. Yield 7.75 pints/156 plants. Our only black bean, productively reliable.
Bean Dry Pole - Cranberry from a friend. Yield 6.5 pints/125 plants. Not the highest yields but very beautiful and cooks up with a substantial texture that is nice in soups.
Bean Dry Pole - Gail Flagg (Chester) from SSE: WI-BO-F. Yield 8 pints/156 plants. Reliably productive in wet and dry years. Great multi-purpose use (we like it in pasta sauce).
Bean Dry Pole - Gousey from SSE: WI-PL-K. Yield 9.5 pints/156 plants. Little white beans (navy bean type). Our best yields but this variety is very late, just making it before killing frost. Some pods tend to split as they ripen, spilling seeds. Our trellises could be higher for this variety as it just grows up and over. Lots of foliage that can get moldy in a wet year mostly due to the vines hanging back over on themselves. But it's quick cooking and tasty besides high yielding so we keep growing it.
Bean Dry Pole - Not named Native American variety from an Indian friend of a friend (we need to track her down to see if the variety has a name). Yield 8.5 pints from 156 plants. 4' vines, pinto type seed, quick cooking. Best for tortillas.
Bean Dry Pole - Porcelain Bean from SSE: NY-ST-J. Yield 6.5 pints/156 plants. The seeds of this bean look like the Indian bean above except with some white added, but the plants are completely different in all other ways. These are the best beans for bean salad as they cook up tender without loosing their shape and they are really big!
Bean Dry Pole - Sangre de Toro from Plum Creek Seeds. Trialed this variety this year. Very small, red beans. Will trial in kitchen and probably do a bigger planting next year.
Bean Dry Pole - Grammy Tilley White Runner from SSE: WI-HO-C. Yield 7 pints/156 plants. Only gets 4-5' tall and pods have 3-4 beans each. Cooks up as a really big, potatoey-textured bean that is great in soup. White blooms are visited by hummingbirds. Doesn't like heat but if planted early will set pods and take a break before setting an additional fall flush.
All of the dry beans can be used as green shell beans if there are immature pods when fall frost threatens. Also, our snap beans (Early Riser pole and Purple Peacock pole) make acceptable dry beans too. The Early Riser are low yielding, however, as they mostly make big flat pods with not a lot of beans crowded in. the Purple Peacock pods shrivel making them hard to shell. The Cranberry beans also have this pod characteristic, but neither of these beans is as hard to shell as the White Rice bush bean. Most of the dry beans we have stuck with over the years have pods that are moisture resistant, and we really like the ones that are hard and kind of shiny inside as they seem to do the best. We make exceptions for this selection when we find varieties whose other qualities make them keepers.
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Post by atash on Oct 19, 2011 14:05:49 GMT -5
That's right, insect pollination will work on P. coccineus as well as hummingbirds. I only said that hummingbirds were its "favorite" pollinator, which of course is slightly tongue-in-cheek since plants don't really have points of view. I did an internet search to find out for certain if it is capable of self-pollinating or not. My suspicion is "no" because the experience of some of my friends, and also my own, is that a lot of blossoms are spent without producing pods when conditions for pollination are poor, whereas I see nearly 100% pod set on common beans as long as temps are warm. Different sites give different answers, but I think most of them are wrong. This one looks scholarly (I'm being tongue-in-cheek again, no flames please), and says definitively that P. coccineus is one of the few species that is known for sure not to self-pollinate: www.internationalpollinatorsinitiative.org/free/FreeChapter32.pdfI don't know what pollinators are available to Raymondo in the Australian highlands. Probably some exotic ones. I think Oz is probably the only part of the world with mammals specialized for pollination! (Some bats pollinate but the flowers seem to adapt to the bats not the other way around). But that's in a different part of the country: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_possumAnyway he probably gets feral honeybees, but I don't know if those have any interest in P. coccineus. |
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Post by extremegardener on Oct 19, 2011 14:53:36 GMT -5
Hey Extreme- that Dolloff looks awesome too- Have you gotten any feedback from folks in hotter states about how it does for them? Found a thread about Dolloff on GW, and it looks like DarJones/Fusion Power has grown them in 7b and they did great for him. Ill write it in my search list for next year!. I hadn't received much feedback, but it seems that they're being picked up by some purveyors of seed in other parts of the continent, so that's interesting. I hadn't seen the Garden Web thread, thanks for mentioning that. I named this particular bean, so it's kind of like my child, if you know what I mean. It does have a distinctive flavor. |
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Post by raymondo on Oct 20, 2011 3:18:09 GMT -5
I don't know what pollinators are available to Raymondo in the Australian highlands. Probably some exotic ones. ... Anyway he probably gets feral honeybees, but I don't know if those have any interest in P. coccineus. We have plenty of European Honey Bees, mostly feral, but you're right atash. They never seemed interested in P. coccineus flowers. Some of the local nectar feeding birds took an interest but not much. We have a variety of native bees but I've never seen them working the runner bean flowers either. Quite a list of beans Walk. |
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Post by robertb on Oct 20, 2011 7:50:18 GMT -5
Honeybees will occasionally visit runners, and sometimes get blamed for biting holes in the back, as they're unable to reach the nectar the 'proper' way. They're probably always visiting flowers which have been sabotaged by bumblebees.
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Post by atash on Oct 20, 2011 10:07:53 GMT -5
That would make sense. I've seen bumblebees rip flowers apart, or tear out the bottoms of nectar spurs they can't reach. We have huge, strong bumbles here. The bumbles are native, the honeybees feral. The honeybees outcompeted the native bees for a long time, then they got rare when sudden colony collapse spread, now the bumbles are back, and I see a lot of other types of bees (e.g. mason bees), but the feral honeybees have gotten rare. Thankfully we have plenty of hummers to visit the scarlet runners. And scarlet runners have long bloom times. Problem this year was the la Nina.  |
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 20, 2011 11:11:16 GMT -5
I don't know what pollinators are available to Raymondo in the Australian highlands. Probably some exotic ones. ... Anyway he probably gets feral honeybees, but I don't know if those have any interest in P. coccineus. We have plenty of European Honey Bees, mostly feral, but you're right atash. They never seemed interested in P. coccineus flowers. Some of the local nectar feeding birds took an interest but not much. We have a variety of native bees but I've never seen them working the runner bean flowers either. . I'm probably showing my ignorance, but don't some of the Australian beetles pollinate at well? I seem to recall reading that Fiddler Beetles do. |
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Post by raymondo on Oct 20, 2011 15:14:16 GMT -5
I'm probably showing my ignorance, but don't some of the Australian beetles pollinate at well? I seem to recall reading that Fiddler Beetles do. Yes, beetles and ants are among the insect pollinators, but not for runner beans unfortunately. |
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