Seed Hunt report: 2014

[blueadzuki]

MON. Mar. 31

Back to Bhavick today. This time I came back with a LOT of moth beans, as I wanted to get some more mottled ones

In fact, I ended up getting FAR more than I actually needed. It turns out that mottled moth beans are a lot more common than I thought in the general population; there's probably a couple hundred per every 4 lb bag. So It's going to take me a LONG time to go through all of the stuff and pick out every one. Pure black one's on the other hand seem to actually be sort of rare.
Besides the beans themselves, there were a few more iteme mixed in. Mostly other small beans (urd, mung, and a few small cowpeas and green chickpeas) and the usualy handful of bindweed seeds.
But by and far the most common including in moth beans appears to be guar, of all things. There was a LOT of it in there, enough that I suspect it's presence would, if not picked out pre-cooking, actually alter the consistency of the resulting dal (presumably make it stickier, gummier and more mucilagenous.)Pity I really can't plant that one myself (I've tried growing guar, and my season is far too short.)
I also managed to get another bag of the hunza type apricots with the pits, so I can try again to get some trees (I started the last ones too early, and they hit the sides of the pots months before I could get them outside). Oh well, at least the first batch told me that these apricots DON'T need vernalization, so I can just plant and wait.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

blueadzuki: I love your seed hunting trips. Every time I'm at the grocers I think about you while looking at the bags of beans. Today I finally found some "Anasazi Beans" with off-type seeds. There were a few pinto beans in the bag. So I bought three bags and took them home and sorted them. I found about 40 beans that were way far off type for Anasazi (The pintos, some dark brown beans, a pink bean, a bean with the Anasazi pattern but with almost black spots, a yellow bean). Then I found a few hundred beans that were on the phenotype limits: Seeds that were almost orange or pink with or without spots. Two different shades of red seeds without spots. Seeds with so many spots that they were almost white. I love sorting seeds! I don't generally grow pole beans, and I expect that the Anasazi will be pole beans, so I'll make an exception for them because I had so much fun.

[blueadzuki]

WENSDAY, Apr.09

Mixed news

The bad news is that it looks like the amount of off adzukis is continuing to drop off perciptously. In fact I got a count of ZERO from my take from one of the herb shops, so that one gets skipped for a while (I'll probably put the third one back in to compensate).
The good news is that, while visiting another market, I found a new brand of senna, and this is the other one. Like the rice beans, the senna comes from two different regions, with two different weed profiles (though unlike them which brands use which ones does't change, some use one, some use the other and that is that). The more common one is the one I have been getting mostly. It has the grass seeds, the hellweed, the stuff I think is goats rue, the Sesbania agustifolia and so on. The other one is less common, but in it's own way more interesting, since in an ironic twsit, around that senna has rice beans as a contaminant! (it's a twist because it is common to see rice beans contaminated with senna) Not only are these from a different region than the normal rice beans (and so of use to me in the project of trying to get stable breeding strains, the stuff in the senna tends to appear a lot less bred. In fact it may actually be wild (i.e. Vinga ubillifera var. gracilis, which does grow in SE asia).
The only down side is that, while the senna was decent in rice beans, that's really all it was decent in. Most of the other weeds were boring. Some bindweeds (two types), little kenaf, little rice, love in a puff seed. two of that herb whose name i've fogotten (since it doesn't grow) couple of the thing that is similar to Sesbania sacraboides but isn't; shorter fatter seed, differnt color hilum (I want to say Phaseolus trifolius, but am not sure (I'm not even sure if that is a real species). Nothing really wrong, but most of it is stuff I already have a fair amount of (or don't particualry have a use for).
And if I was actually buying the stuff for medicine, I'd definitely go for another brand. It may be low in weeds, but the amount of mud, twigs, and damaged looking seed in there is shocking.

[blueadzuki]

WENDSDAY, APRIL 16

Usual stuff, some more rice beans, some more senna (same brand as last week) The third medicine shop still has off adzukis in it's rice beans, so I'm stable for the moment.

The one slightly disturbing thing I noticed is that the senna bags also seemed to have traces of the weeds of the OTHER sort of senna (hellweed, Sesbania aculeata etc.) So I may be wrong, and they also flip back and forth on source (or those weeds are found in both source areas).

[blueadzuki]

Friday April 18

Did a Bhavick run yesterday. Got some more bags of moth beans, another bag of horse gram, some more parvals and some more long pod lablabs. The parvals look better than the last time (some of them should ripen with the rice trick)the lablabs worse (most of the seed is not only under ripe but full of rotten spots, I may end up chucking the whole batch.

Only real surprise was in the horse gram. Not in the weeds, which were nothing to write home about (few binds and a Borreria seed)But there was a new color. I'm used to seeing black horse gram beans scattered around (which stand out amongst the generally light colored seeds quite pronouncedly. But this bag and a few seeds that were actually completely white (normal commercial horse gram color is a middle tan with brownish speckles) Don't know if it's dominant or recessive, but I'm a little surprised to know it is there and hasn't become the Dominant selection (since usually if white skins are available, they become the form of choice commercially.)

[12540dumont]

How are the apricots coming?

[blueadzuki]

Not really all that well. The pits of the ones I got from Bhavik were a LOT less fertile than the ones I used before (that I got from a store in NYC). Out of the 30-40 kernels I managed to extract intact from the bags pits (four of five got crushed popping the shells off' they always do) only five actually germinated (the last time, I had about forty plants out of seventy odd pits). And four of them basically died a week later, their roots pushed them up out of the soil and then withered up. I potted up the one decently growing one yesterday, and now it's a matter of letting it have it's time inside until it is a big enough sapling to put outside and see how it likes the climate here.

[blueadzuki]

And now the tree has vanished (I think a squirrel ate it) Oh well, third times the charm. Though I may wait a little while until I can get the apricots from the first source; those seemed more fertile.

Sorry for the long gap since my last message, but the seed hunts have been rather dull. Since I've mostly been trying to maximized my off adzuki supply while I can, I've been more or less tied to the same route and the same hunts each week.

Besdies them, I WAS able to get a few more bags of the senna with the other rice beans.

And while I wait for a chance to get the aprocots, I have a new stone fruit to play around with. It is now the season of the umebushi plum (Prunus mume), a Japanese species actually closer related to the apricot, which is normally pickled while unripe and served over rice (or in spirits). And this year I finally found a few picked late enough they are actually ripe. While it turns out they STILL taste awful raw even in that state, it at least means I have mature pits this time (becuase they are normally picked so early, the pits are usually too immature to make strong trees) I know Ume doesn't come true from seed, but since it is the flowering plum, I may at least get some pretty trees while I wait to encounter the rumored thing I have heard of, a strain of Prunus mume with fruits sufficiently sweet that they CAN be eaten raw as fruit.
And yes, I know that there are many online sellers from whom I could have gotten all the ume seeds or treelets I wanted but I that is not the point. There is something satisfying about taking something obejectively of little to no value (the pit out of a piece of fruit you would otherwise toss in the trash) and turning it into sometihng of value (a tree with nice flowers.)

[steev]

Lead into gold, as it were.

[blueadzuki]

Wed, may 21.

Finally a little news to report on the rice bean hunt scene. The bad news is that another shop "flipped" last week, so I'm now down to 1 (on the bright side, that cuts a bit more time off my trip, so today I was actually able to make it to the ramen joint I have been promising myself for lunch every Wed. for the last three or four months.) and even that is getting a little skimpy.
The good news is that today's bag actually contained the ultimate "prize in the crackerjack box" for these beans; a wild soybean. First one of the type that shows up in this stuff I've seen since the winter of the year before last (and probably only the tenth I've seen period of this type.)

[copse]

What differentiates a wild soy bean from a domesticated one? Smaller and darker?

[blueadzuki]

Actually, the domestic soybean has been bred so far from the wild that the two are no longer considered the same species. Wild soybeans are Glycine soja, domestic are G. Max. Though for all I know they've been put back.
together again in some taxonomy lumping program (they did it to wheat).

Yes, wild soybeans are a lot smaller than most domestic ones, in fact pretty much all commercial ones (I have one or two domestic strains whose seeds are almost as small as wilds, but those are the exception, not the rule) I won't say they are "darker" for the simple reason that domestic soybeans run the color gamut from dead white to jet black.

As I sort of insinuated I have two kinds of wild soybeans, at least two kinds of seeds I think are wild soybeans. The first which I KNOW is G.soja (and which is what I found today) looks like a very tiny "normal" soybean, about the size of a beluga lentil (or a flat peppercorn) it's usually sort of black, but often has a greyish "gunk" over the surface (I counted when I put this one away and I have twelve wild soybeans of this types. Ten have the gunk, two (which are also slightly larger) do not sometimes they have mottling as well (reddish or yellowish).

The other type which shows up in the other type of rice bean from time to time, looks very different. In fact the only reason I think it's a wild soybean is because that is what the only picture I ever saw of something that looked like it said it was (but bear in mind the place I saw it, back in college was in a guide to tropical weed seeds published by the Malaysian forest service, so there were a LOT of mistranslations and misidentification in there. THAT kind is brownish with darker brown mottling and has a HUGE hilum, in fact one about the size it would be on a domestic, so it basically take up an entire side of the seed(which is, again about peppercorn sized but flat) and actually curves it a little. It almost looks like what you would get if a domestic aborted as soon as it began but somehow managed to develop a full and natural seed coat. It isn't that (unlike the first kind, I HAVE planted the second kind previously, and it makes fully healthy, albeit rather odd looking plants, An aborted domestic that small would be non-viable.)

That's another big difference Unlike the domestic soybean the wild is pretty much ALWAYS a vine, not an upright bush. Flowers tend to be colored more often as well (usually purple)

[blueadzuki]

6/4/14

the last source for the rice beans "flipped" today, so I suppose that is pretty much it for rice beans and co until next year's season (barring running into a store that has bags of rice beans from one of the small number of packers who use the "other" kind). So I guess next week, the seed hunt moves to Curry Hill and the Indian stores.

[blueadzuki]

6/11/14

As I thought, the other two rice bean sources also have "flipped"; so probably no more adzukis for the foreseeable future.

As planned, today I went to the Curry hill area of Manhattan, to do a little hunting among the Indian stores. Mixed success. I did manage to get another bag of the apricots I want to plant, but that was basically it for non spices from the trip; the are no longer carrying the honey I was after.

Hunt hall consisted of two 1 lb. bags of coriander seed That I could see had some vetch in them. I turned out that between the two, they had quite a bit of vetch. In fact, I haven't seen so much since mu college hunting days(maybe those two bags were from the very bottom of the sack. Wound up with about another dozen V. sativa minoridens, and 3-4 more V. hirsuta (since hirsuta often shows up still in the pods, and I see no reason to open the pods yet, numbers are not always precise.) and 3-4 Medicago murcoleptis pods (though most look to immature to have good seed in them).Also a few wheat grains showed up after the float test.

There was also another PPP field pea in one of the bag, which are always welcome and needful additions to my stock. I originally would have said there were TWO PPP peas, and that one was a BLACK one, the first black PPP pea I've ever seen. But it turned out that what I thought was a simple break in the seedcoat was actually an insect exit hole; and said insect had eaten the entire inside of the pea, so that one is a no-go. Pity, I would have liked black peas in my PPP mix.

[blueadzuki]

Also two pictures from what is actually growing

First this showed up in the mixed grain pot (where I planted any small grains that were not wheat) . I can only assume, given the shape of the spikelets, that I must have gotten one and though it was a small oat. Anyone know what it could be? The shape is familiar, but I can't place it.



And second, whatever the plant it that makes up unknown pot #1 (the stuff I keep finding in the lentils) is now in flower. Still have no clue what it is, but it is quite pretty (pretty enough, in fact, I may move any seed of it from the pot and that I get in future bags to the front of the yard, where the wildflower garden is)