Tepary Beans

[jim]

Atash....Some people have observed a very strange thing with interspecific Phaseolus crosses, especially with P. vulgaris.
There seems to be a rejection of the DNA from the other species. Crossing over occurs, but is more limited than straight vulgaris/vulgaris crosses. Some speculate that it is simply selection toward the vulgaris type, obviously you are selecting less and less of the genome of the other species over time. Im not sure anyone really knows.
Stable varieties have been created that have the drought resistance from acutifolius, but not much else...so it can still be a worthwhile endeavor.
Jim

[oxbowfarm]

May 6, 2012 2:36:28 GMT -5 atash said:

Consistent with what Jim says, I don't think Dr. Deppe claims to have made the cross--instead she says that she has an unusually effective pollinating fauna in her field.

We've grown them. The beans themselves look like one or the other of the parents--they don't look intermediate. I did not see the plants while they were growing.

I'd say there are quite a few intermediate color classes at least. Black seed predominates, second most dominant color is Gaucho gold. But there are lots of intermediate browns from dark coffee colors to medium red and olive browns.

I grew just a short 12 foot row of this last season and planted it far too late. The only mature seed I got was the earliest maturity plants so I don't have a full representative sample. I'm pretty impressed by it's speed and yield I must say.

I'm planning to do a much larger grow out with the seed I managed to collect from last season. It's definitely very interesting material to work with, even if it may not be a true wide cross. Joseph gave me some speckled gray teparies that I can use to compare the phenotypes.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

The tepary beans that I have been sharing were part of my legume trials last summer. A small percentage of tepary beans inter-planted with a lot of vulgaris beans and a few seeds of about 10 other pulse species. The teparies were a gift from Steev. I didn't notice pollinators on the beans, but I also didn't look for them. So there may be a small chance of inter-species pollination.

In my garden, the teparies were the last beans to be harvested. I think that was due to an indeterminate growth habit: No sense picking the early maturing beans on a plant that is still green and growing. They were, nevertheless, a short season bean, especially when compared with all the beans that didn't produce offspring in my garden because they required too long of a growing season.

The plants were viney, but not twisty like a pole bean. I grew them as a mound on the ground, or the vines rested on the other beans. The seed pods have an explosive dispersal mechanism so my strategy for harvest was: pick whole vines, lay them on a tarp, stomp on them.

[12540dumont]

September 16, The harvest of Carol's Beans. These had a lovely flavor.
Templeton, Raymundo let me know if you want some. This was the yield from one (25' bed). I think I sent some to just about everyone else.

This year I plan to put in two 50' Rows. I also really liked Gaucho. This was a good bean.

Joseph sent me some teparies....and a pile of bush beans, that I want to try, and I have to find room for these:

From the Desert Legume Program Cajanus cajan 910513 pigeon pea Phaseolus maculatus - 10026 Phaseolus Angussimus -970021

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[12540dumont]

These were them growing in July. I planted them at the end of May.

Some of these beans got away, and started sprouting again in August.

I think if you had a long enough season, you could get them planted in April and start another patch in July.

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[raymondo]

Nice pic of Carol's beans. Thanks for the offer Holly but you already sent me some. I grew them this season to bulk up so I could share them around. I split them into bush vs pole types. Of course the poles will still contain some bush types but the separated bush types should stay that way.

[12540dumont]

Yeah, they were a jungle tangle of beans, climbing up the dill!

[steev]

Did you send me some of those? Need some Blue-Speckled teparies?

[12540dumont]

Joseph, The bean guru of the USDA, Molly Welsh (she just retired), did tell me that sometimes you can't tell if a bean has crossed. It doesn't show up in the seed coat.

Joseph, do you grow rhubarb? Pretty peas

[12540dumont]

Here's a photo of Carol's bean when it was young. They ended up climbing the dill!

I have done all my rhubarb from seed. It's tedious. Start them in a paper towel in a plastic bag. As soon as you see sprouts, pot them up.

I'm so pleased with the asparagus and rhubarb. I think they would do great for you. I love that they just come back. Of course, from seed, I can't even pick my rhubarb till next year. 3 years from seed before you can pick, and you always have to leave some to nurture the plant.

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[oxbowfarm]

I want to grow some Black Mitla alongside Joseph's Blue Speckled tepary to get a comparison. There is some debate if Black Mitla is actually a tepary or just a tepary-like common bean.

[raymondo]

Mar 24, 2013 19:07:44 GMT -5 oxbowfarm said:

I want to grow some Black Mitla alongside Joseph's Blue Speckled tepary to get a comparison. There is some debate if Black Mitla is actually a tepary or just a tepary-like common bean.

Carol Deppe had an unintended cross between Black Mitla and Gaucho, a common bean. I think such a thing much more likely between common beans.
What are the botanical differences between Phaseolus acutifolius and P. vulgaris, anyone know?

[12540dumont]

Ray, One is cute and the other is vulgar! ;D

[oxbowfarm]

The flowers are definitely quite different, although there is a big range of flower morphology in common beans. Tepary beans seem to have these narrow wings that droop below the keel.

In the 2012 SSE yearbook a lister from Texas said that he though Mitla Black was possibly not a true tepary because the flowers were different. He had several other teparies listed and he's been listing Mitla Black since 2004. It got me wondering if Carol's wide-cross wasn't as wide as she thought. It also seems like Mitla Black is by far the most popular "tepary bean" variety grown outside the Southwest due to its very wide adaptability. This would be easy to explain if it wasn't in fact a tepary at all. That's why I want to grow it next to some other tepary beans and see how it looks in comparison.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I looked up the phenotypic description for tepary beans and common beans at www.prota4u.org

As far as I can tell as a non-botanist struggling to understand highly technical terms, the most easily observed differences are:

Tepary Bean	Common Bean
The meaning of acutifolia is "Sharp Leaved".	Vulgaris is the Latin word for "Common". Don't look at me that way. I couldn't have known!!!
Smoother. (In my garden last year, the leaves and fruits were not as hairy as common beans, more like peas than beans.)	Slightly fuzzy. I knew it!!! I've been complaining for years about the fuzziness of common bean leaves, stems, and fruits.
Roots fibrous: (like a mop head).	Well developed taproot.
Stipules lance shaped (stipules are the tiny leaves where the leaf stem connects to the vine)	stipules triangular
Flower wings: Long and narrow. (With a gold star to oxbowfarm).	Flower wings: Egg shaped with the narrow end attached to flower.
Compressed pod (flat)	Linear pod (round)
Explosive seed dispersal.	Domestication selected against pod shattering.
Short but distinct beak on pod.	Prominent beak.
1st true leaves are narrow (length about 2X width), truncate, and have strikingly short petioles.	1st true leaves are blocky (width and length about equal), cordate (heart shaped), and have long petioles (around 6X longer than teparies).
Have a dull seed coat.	Have a glossy seed coat.

Both species have the same number of chromosomes, which makes crossing easier than if the number was different. I was able to find a few photos [1 2 3] of "Black Mitla" bean pods on the web. They looked more like common beans to me than tepary beans because: the seed pods hadn't shattered explosively for the photos (and the bloggers didn't mention that trait, one of them even commented that the pods were hard to open), and because the pods were strongly beaked, and because the pods were more round than flat.

The explosive shattering of the seed pod was the most distinctive characteristic of the (one and only) tepary cultivar that I grew. It was such a pronounced trait that I was not able to remove a pod from the plant without it shattering. I had to pick whole plants and thresh them vines and all over a tarp, or I had to wrap my palm around the pod before picking so that the beans popped into my hand and not all over everywhere. The photos I found on the web for Black Mitla pods shows that the pods were picked from the vine without shattering.

The only photo I could find of Black Mitla flowers looks like a common bean flower. And the stipules look triangular to me like a common bean and not lance shaped like a tepary.

Some seed catalogs call this variety a vulgaris bean. Seeds of Change calls it a tepary. After they sent me a dent corn labeled as Rainbow Inca sweet corn, I haven't had much confidence in Seeds of Change.

So with the limited amount of data that I was able to find on "Black Mitla Bean", if I was required to place it into a species I'd call it Phaseolus vulgaris.