Tepary Beans

[Joseph Lofthouse]

A few years ago Carole Deppe noticed a naturally occurring bean hybrid. She attributes it to the two patches growing close together, and there were plenty of pollinators. Last summer I happened to have inter-planted tepary beans among my common dry beans... So after I learned about her hybrid I sorted 10 pounds of bean seed to retrieve several hundred tepary beans out of the lot. I intend to plant them in a row this spring with a row of landrace common beans on one side of them and a row of Carole's segregating cross on the other. I'm interested in seeing if my garden will produce an inter-species cross. It should be easy enough to see, because my tepary beans are gray, and none of the common beans are gray.

[oxbowfarm]

Well we had a pretty interesting beginning of a discussion about Carol's Mitla BLack/Gaucho "wide cross" starting in the adaptivar thread but it was deleted for some reason? I'm going to try and resurrect it here. Hopefully this is an appropriate location for it and we can dig a little deeper.

The more I look into tepary/vulgaris hybrid crosses the more I suspect that Carol's Mitla/Gaucho is a straight vulgaris cross and not a tepary/vulgaris wide cross.

I've spoken to Carol about how this cross happened and she felt that interspecies wide crosses of all kinds are more likely in the PNW because of climate. Her feeling is that the cool, mild weather allows flowers to senesce much more slowly giving time for a much slower growing pollen tube (like from a different species) to reach an ovary and pollinate a wide cross. She says Alan Kapuler has noticed in coccineus/vulgaris too. That's fine. I think that is a great explanation as to why she sees so much more bean crosses in general than I do in my climate.

Where I think the confusion about this "wide cross" comes in is that I strongly suspect Mitla Black (the tepary parent) is not a tepary bean at all. There are a number of reasons for this.

• Mitla Black is by far most popular "tepary bean" in use by folks growing them outside of the Southwest because of its much wider adaptability. This suggests maybe its dramatically different from other tepary beans. Perhaps not a tepary at all?
  
  
• In the 2012 SSE Yearbook TX LA M2 (who's listed it and other tepary beans since 2004) says this "2012: 90, vines to 3', small black seed, may not be a true tepary bean, flower is different, grew well on the Gulf Coast of Texas"
  
  
• The F1 generation behaved very uncharacteristically for a bean hybrid; " Unfortunately, when hybridization is undertaken to introgress tepary bean genes into common bean, serious obstacles are encountered. F1 hybrids are effectively self-sterile, and early generation backcross plants also frequently exhibit significant sterility problems (Mejia-Jimenez etal. 1994; Parker and Michaels1986; Thomas and Waines1984)". Carol said she had almost 5% crosses in the hybrid year. According to the literature, deliberate tepary/vulgaris crosses show very high levels of sterility in the F1 generation. How did Carol get such high levels of survival and self-fertility in the early generations? My suspicion is that it's because she didn't actually have a tepary/vulgaris cross, she had a vulgaris/vulgaris cross.
  

Carol has stated repeatedly in print that common beans cross very freely in her climate and local ecosystem and she has to be careful to isolate different varieties. The reason she was growing Mitla Black and Gaucho so close was because she thought they were different species.

My strong suspicion is that Mitla Black is a Phaseolus vulgaris bean that looks a heck of a lot like a tepary in phenotype. Close enough to fool you if you aren't looking close at the more subtle keys the way TX LA M2 did.

I intend to grow Mitla Black myself this year alongside an undisputed tepary bean to see any differences myself.

This is in no way an attempt to minimize the awesome work Carol Deppe does. I also am not trying to bad-mouth the Gaucho/Mitla bean cross material, I was really impressed with it. I just don't think it was a wide cross.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I merged the Mitla BLack/Gaucho discussion into this thread so all the posts about Carole's "interspecies" bean cross and other Tepary bean crosses with Common beans are now located in this thread. The posts merged chronologically, so scroll back a few pages in this thread to access them. (Sorry that I moved the posts into a new thread, and then noticed that they flowed better as part of this thread so moved them a second time. )

OxbowFarm: It would be interesting if you are able to do some other phenotype checks on your Black Mitla plants: Is the root system fibrous? Or does it have a strong taproot? Are the leaves fuzzy or smooth? I'm looking forward to reading about any observations you might make.

I am looking forward to growing Carole's cross this summer. Naturally occurring bean crosses are exciting. Should be lots of good stuff in there, especially since my seed came from a grower in California (thanks Holly), so it's likely to be more adapted to my dry climate than if it came directly from damp Oregon.

[oxbowfarm]

It should be interesting to compare them, I'm not going to count my chickens just yet.

I'm betting that if Mitla Black is a P. vulgaris, its probably in the Central American race vs Andean. There's a nice paper online with a chart showing differences between the two races of common bean.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Mar 25, 2013 13:23:52 GMT -5 oxbowfarm said:

There's a nice paper online

I haven't even got germplasm from all the major corn races incorporated into my sweet corn yet, and now you're telling me that there are also races of beans? Oh no!!!! Mr. Bill!!!

[12540dumont]

Joseph, I have high hope of turning you into a beaniac.

Ox, Could you take a run over to Cornell and read this:
Reference: McElroy, J.B.. 1985. Breeding dry beans, Phaseolus vulgaris L., for common bacterial resistance derived from Phaseolus acutifolius. unspecified PhD thesis, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY..

Although there are 4 or so Black Mitla beans at the USDA, none are listed as Phaseolus acutifolius.

Native Sead Search lists Black Mitla as a Phaseolus Vulgaris.

shop.nativeseeds.org/collections/common-beans?page=2

They are my favorite site for bean and corn porn.....

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I might already be a beaniac... I just haven't realized it yet. I sure had fun attempting to start a bean landrace last summer. This year I might actually grow lupini, fava, and garbanzo. Intending to give soy a try. And cowpeas again.

I'd much prefer to grow dry beans rather than something like broccoli or lettuce... Once harvested dry beans are not perishable as long as I harvest and store them properly. I can take them to the farmer's market week after week until they sell. That's becoming more important to me all the time.

[steev]

The lupini will need processing and, given the cultural bias of your area, good luck getting folks to buy them, processed or not.

Don't know for sure, but I suspect there are garbanzos that you could seed early Winter, which would sprout very early Spring for a decent crop; I understand the black ones are best for cold soil.

Cowpeas are cold-averse, but great for hot and dry, though not so much as teparies.

Consider lentils, very early up and cold-tolerant.

Urd beans and Mat beans for hot and dry.

Except lupinis, these are all relatively small beans, not much good for picking, but very useful when cutting the plant for drying and threshing. More dal than chili, on the plate.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I looked up the recipe for lupini beans. Two weeks worth of soaking? And changing the water every day? I could certainly do that for myself at home, but not for market.

[steev]

Exactly. I think that's why my produce market had a box of them dry a couple years ago, but not since. Of course, I'd no idea about them, so I didn't buy a pound or so, and this year have had to depend on the kindness of Holly, which beats the hell out of "the kindness of strangers"; Stella! notwithstanding.

[raymondo]

Thanks for that great little table Joseph. I'll store it somewhere. I've grown teparies a few times but have never taken notice of it compared to the common bean. I do recall the shattering though. I'm pretty sure that some common beans have this trait too though off hand I cannot remember which ones.

[12540dumont]

So, I do have a thought for the Lupini Beans!

I talked to a small processor yesterday. He pickles green beans for Bloody Marys. He's interested in my Lupini's for selling to the same accounts. So, I may have a market for all of us for them dried.

I'm going to try and work out a recipe for them. I had them in Italy. As I recall they were very salty and made you thirsty! (Sort of like peanuts).

Anyway, one of my Aunts told me that after ww2, she was so hungry, her mother would give them lupinis to eat, because they filled the belly.

Joseph, you sly little undercover beaniac. Come out of the closet and play. Boy, do I have a bean or 2 for you!

[raymondo]

Why not go for sweet lupins? That way, you avoid all the fuss of rinsing out the alkaloids before consumption.
I remember those 'salty' lupins from when I was in France. They were often served with aperitifs, along with other nibble food.

[12540dumont]

Raymundo, we are doing sweet lupins! However, the University of Milan said as there are no "standards" for lupinis...it's safer to soak them than to be sorry.

[steev]

I don't know why they would have to be very salty, other than that being the easiest product to produce and maybe tradition. Once they're processed by leaching, it seems one could deal with them many ways. I look forward to experimentation, though as yet I have only one plant.

Never having tasted them, I can only suppose they'd be good with olive oil, parsley, and minced garlic, like garbanzos, but perhaps one doesn't want to scarf lupinis the way I do garbanzos.