Fort Portal Mixed Bean-Something Interesting

[blueadzuki]

Hi All.

Today while planting out the seedlings I got from the beans I bought from Richters herbs, I noticed something very interesting about one of them, the bean/bean landrace listed as "Fort Portal Mixed". On each the 9 seedlings of this bean, there is stong purple mottling ON THE COTYLEDONS. I don't mean a faint tracery such as might be attibutable to a darkly mottled skinned bean "bleeding some of it's coloration onto the innner seed as the skin stretches due to inbibing (one of the Armenian Ginat blacks may have that), I mean VIVID purple streaks all over the cotelydon's surfaces (in any case Fort Portal isn't a streak skinned bean) and stopping at the beginning of the radicle (which is sort of a flat pinky purple). I even pushed the cot's apart on one of them a little (not much with only 9 I can't afford to risk breaking any) and it seems the streaks are even present on the INSIDE of the cots, the surfaces that touch each other and become the top of the seed leaves.) I didn't take any seed coats off while the seed was dry, so I can't tell if the beans have the streaks when they are dry beans, nor am I likey to be able to find out at the present (while I do have one seed left, it is very different in appearance, different enough to lead me to think it is of a diffrent strain and what applied to the others may not apply to this one) No photos at the moment (I'd rather wait until the plants are a little bigger so as to have sometihng a little easier to take a picture of) but I wonder if this indicates that this is a mottle leaved bean (never heard of one, but I suppose they could exist).

[blueheron]

That sounds interesting ! Please post pics when you can, I'm very curious.

[blueadzuki]

First pics. Soory about the rotten lighting (I just managed to find time to take them and the sun is going down now. and general fuzzyness (my cellphone's camera is not that great as closeups and its the only digital I have)



and one of the openend one to show the spots on the inside of the cots (looks like I was wrong about the permanent leaves having spots too, they are clearly unspotted.

[blueheron]

Thanks for posting the pics - I can make out some of the purple markings. I grew about 15 different beans last year and never saw anything like that. Interesting to see if this trait carries on through seeds saved from this plant.

[blueadzuki]

Apr 17, 2013 19:42:36 GMT -5 blueheron said:

Thanks for posting the pics - I can make out some of the purple markings. I grew about 15 different beans last year and never saw anything like that. Interesting to see if this trait carries on through seeds saved from this plant.

Well, given that we are talking about 9 plants not one, and they ALL have them, I'd say odds are really really high.

[galina]

From memory, the 'Meuch' beans have purple streaked cots too. It is quite unusual though.

[galina]

May 11, 2013 3:24:04 GMT -5 galina said:

From memory, the 'Meuch' beans have purple streaked cots too. It is quite unusual though.

Two days on and I have germination of beans 'Alte Aldeiner' and 'Cranberry lilac' and both have purple cotyledons.

[blueadzuki]

Now that some of them are flowering, I should also note that the beans have purple flower petioles too, but ONLY at the point where the primary petiole attaches to the parent plant, the purple runs out a little before the primary attaches to the secondaries (Fort Portal mixed seems to be one of those beans where the flowers are double stalked. one runs out of the parent plant and then after a while this forms a node where two more stalks run out on which the actual flowers are set. On some of my otherbean, the first of these two stalks is quite short to the point of being non existant. I think of those as single stalked and the other as double.) Again, the color doesn't seem to show up until the stalks and flowers actually beging opening (the buds don't seem to have it).

[josephsimcox]

Hello Blueadzuki,

I am the one that collected that bunch of beans in Fort Portal, Uganda. It was absolutely amazing seeing the ladies with such a diverse number of different beans most of them all mixed together. One of the rarest and most amazing beans that i ever collected was found at another vendor in Fort Portal; a dry bean with a very colorful jade green color! These beans were offered in 2012 through Richter's SeedZoo, and they sold out very quickly. I believe that we still have some stored in Italy with the rest of that collection from Uganda. If you or anyone you know has acquired the "Fort Portal Jade Bean" I would be very interested in getting in contact with them.

This year we are growing out almost 3oo accessions of Phaseolus vulgaris and we have some extraordinarily unusual stuff in that collection.

If you are a real bean lover stay in touch.
Best, Joseph Simcox

[blueadzuki]

Jul 20, 2013 16:26:02 GMT -5 josephsimcox said:

Hello Blueadzuki,

I am the one that collected that bunch of beans in Fort Portal, Uganda. It was absolutely amazing seeing the ladies with such a diverse number of different beans most of them all mixed together. One of the rarest and most amazing beans that i ever collected was found at another vendor in Fort Portal; a dry bean with a very colorful jade green color! These beans were offered in 2012 through Richter's SeedZoo, and they sold out very quickly. I believe that we still have some stored in Italy with the rest of that collection from Uganda. If you or anyone you know has acquired the "Fort Portal Jade Bean" I would be very interested in getting in contact with them.

This year we are growing out almost 3oo accessions of Phaseolus vulgaris and we have some extraordinarily unusual stuff in that collection.

If you are a real bean lover stay in touch.
Best, Joseph Simcox

Greetings Joe and welcome to the board!

I in fact grew the Fort Portal Jade the year before last, though I got no final seed (squirrels). I agree it is an incredibly colorful bean though given it's shape, I think of it as being more closely realted to the Bantu bean you collected rather than the Fort Portal mixed.
In theory I may have some Fort Portal Jade around only I can't tell it apart and it isn't jade! I'm one of the people who got their beans BEFORE Ricthers went through and pulled out all of the non-green ones (In fact, I'm the person who sort of caused the pull out, as the presence of the non greens led me to ask if Bantus had been mislabeled. That went into the pot with my Bantus this season, and may have come back out, but since ALL of my Bantus came back purple, I have no clue which seed might be the Fort Portal Amethyst.
BTW if you are re-growing out the accessions, you may want to re-grow out the Speckled Grey as well. Based on my results and the results of those I know who tried it, the Seed Richters got may be now getting very old (since they don't regenerate themselves). I got a germination of 1 out of 4 and the other two people I know got 0/11 and 0/15.

Edit
Oh I'm sorry! I forgot you wanted info on how the Fort Portal Jade actually grew Here's what I can tell (some of this actually came from this years Bantu growing, but since, as I said the two are very. very close, growth info for one pretty much applies for the other.
I can't actually tell whether FPJ/B is a bush or pole type bean or indeed both. Some plants stayed as simple uprights (very short ones) and others trailed and climbed.
Surprisingly given that Fort Portal is only about half a degree from the Equator, both Fort Portal Jade and Bantu appear to be cold loving beans. The throve in the near freezing temperatures we had over most of the spring, but began to really suffer once it got warm. There was (and is) one that was a bit more heat tolerant and is still out there.
Flower color is pink (this seems to be the case for all of the African beans I grew) pods are filet type (flat).
One odd thing I noticed during harvest concerns the aborted seeds. It seems that Bantu (I never saw any fully mature FPJ, so I can't comment on that) begins to firm up the inside of the seed very early, way earlier than most beans do (so that at a size when you'd expect the aborted bean to squish or pop there is actually a little firm set of cotyledons in there (I really should have saved a few of the aborts and re-planted them)
On the whole it is a surpisingly productive bean for me. If there is any drawback to the type I'd say it is actually the shortness of the plants, which means that, given the length of the pods, the tips of the pods actually wind up almost level with the ground; easy picking for rampaging animals (I only got seed off the Bantus because I planted them in a pot and put the pot on a pedestal.
Apart from the longer seed, the Fort Portal Mixed grew more or less the same as the Bantu though with the percentages reversed (one cold loving plant, most warm loving plants).
And I'm not sure how "mixed" the mixed are. Based on what I saw this year, it almost looks like rather than being a mix of many different beans, the Fort portal is largely one type of very variable one, whose seed coat color seems to be growing condtion dependent. All of the short season ones came back purple, all of the long season ones; whitish (some with a touch of purple around the hilum) I'm leaving the last of the pods out extra long to see if the colors change with more time, but I think that seed color may have less to do with genetics here and more with how the seed cures down.