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Post by diane on Jan 29, 2015 20:36:06 GMT -5
Do you sow everything you find? Your final sentence above suggests that you don't.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 29, 2015 21:00:16 GMT -5
The most accurate answer to that question is that I don't sow everything I find IMMEDIATELY. Because I have such a bad pest problem and my conditions are so iffy I often will "stockpile" seed over time until I accumulate enough that I feel comfortable planting it (Ideally, until I have enough that I can plant a reasonable amount and still have a bit left over as a "fallback" in case something goes wrong). To my mind, the losses I will get due to some of the seed getting too old and losing viability are still less than the likelihood that, if I plant everything I find each year the season thereafter, In will end up losing ALL of it EACH year. For a lot of the things I grow, the losses due to critters and bad seasons are MASSIVE. Last year with the rice beans, I planted each of the three sections with probably two or three POUNDS of seed, and I don't think any section wound up with more than 20 plants. ALL the rest were devoured by the digging animals. And that's NORMAL for me (in fact it often is worse, I planted around 10 lbs. of the mottled eyed copweas, and not ONE made it out of the ground; the animals ate them ALL). Methods for upping the survival rate (such as planting the seeds indoors and then transplanting the plantlets) do not really work, in fact the destruction rate for those is probably HIGHER than for the direct mass seedings since I have to turn the soil to put them in (some of the critter damage is from things eating the seeds or seedlings, but just as much is from insect eaters who dig the seedlings up or chew threw them in an attempt to eat any bugs turned up when I dug. At least with the direct planting the soil will often have "settled" by the time the seeds actually poke up.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 29, 2015 21:16:26 GMT -5
Oh and technically I don't sow everything eventually either. There are a fair number of things I find that I know from experience will not grow here, or that I do not want. The leadplant seed would probably fit the first category, since I know it to be subtropical (plus it IS a very fast growing tree, I hardly have room for a couple hundred saplings, especially ones that could theoretically grow faster than I can keep it trimmed.) In the latter would be things like the "hellweed" which I still pick out of the senna, only now I do it to make sure it winds up in the toilet as opposed to outside, since the last thing I want is more of it in my garden (one permanent scar on my finger is enough.) And while I still DO plant the bindweed relations from time to time (in a pot, I'm not a fool.) Most of them will be yanked up as soon as they reach the point where I can tell which species they are. If it looks "normal" out it goes. Most of the time the "grasp vine" gets yanked out as well since it is so aggressive, but I've been giving that a reprieve the last few years, in an attempt to get one to get all the way through their lifecycle so I can tell once and for all WHICH seed in the mix it actually is, and possibly what the hell species it is (leaves divided into 5-7 palmate lobes, whole plant covered with coarse brown hair, and a lack of obvious flowers [it makes these sort of "seed knots" Look like bindweed buds, but the flowers never actually show up, the pods sort of form spontaneously in them. ALMOST got there a few years ago but then I found out that when my Dad hired people to paint the outside of the house, that included all of the iron railings, so they tore all the plants off them.
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Post by darrenabbey on Jan 30, 2015 0:00:02 GMT -5
One of these days you're going to have to get/share some nice photos of all these variant seeds.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 30, 2015 0:51:27 GMT -5
I can try, but since my only camera is the one on my phone, I'm not sure the resolution is good enough. Seeds are rather small after all.
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Post by darrenabbey on Jan 30, 2015 1:03:26 GMT -5
They are difficult things to photograph. A flatbed scanner would do well, however. They have a surprisingly thick depth of field.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 30, 2015 15:35:43 GMT -5
I used to use a scanner. Our old scanner did very good jobs, at least with larger seeds. However that one is not currently usable (though that could change comparatively soon) At the moment, if I want to do a scan, I need to use Mom's scanner, which is a LOT blurrier (and has some problems with color contrast). Plus mom is rather protective of it, so getting her permission to use it takes a lot of convincing.
Here are a few photos
1. The Adzukis
The pic above shows MOST of what I have managed to accumulate. Missing are any beans I harvested last season (tan/cream/green, see below) since, like pretty much all of the beans I harvested last year, they are in little individual ziplocs sitting in an old King Leo Peppermint stick tin. I have this idea of trying to keep each group I get seed off of separate by parent plant, to keep a record of which produce well versus poorly (at this point, I've had so few make it through I can actually do that, when I have more I'll probably have to abandon that plan as the vines will likely wind up too intermixed for me to identify which is which with any confidence.
Besides those there is also a bag of reds in the tin from the year before, the offspring of a red adzuki that slipped through my checking, got tossed out with the leftover flat reds and managed to survive among them. However, those were harvested extremely immature, and based on the seed's appearance I doubt many, if any, of them will grow if I ever plant them.
Also missing are the tiny mottled ones that occupy a cell in the "X-box", the box I use for storing seed I can't identify or have in extremely limited quantities and feel I need to give extra protection to. Those are there because given how small they are, I think there may be a possibility they are actually true wild adzuki beans, Vigna angularis nakashime (that's supposed to be only found in Japan, but it would not really surprise me to find out that it was now naturalized in parts of China as well. Many Chinese weeds are now naturalized in Japan, why not vice-versa
The two vials on the hinge are seed I got out of earlier plantings. All of the mottled brown came from one plant, the tan probably from two (about eight or nine tans MADE seedpods but I think only two made seed that matured early enough to survive when I culled out seed that was so immature it could have little to no chance of growing.
Actually those brown probably represent the best success I have to date. Like with the rice beans, a lot of the adzukis are really a bit longer season than is really good for here, and even those that can make pods that mature fully usually only have time to do so to the first one or two. Those brown ones, on the other hand actually managed to make a lot of mature pods; it flowers and pods REALLY fast.
That's also why the green ones are mixed in with the cream and tan ones. At this point I'm still not sure if there are adzukis in there that actually ARE green or if all of the greens are cream and tan that got harvested too early. And until I manage to get a plant that is early enough to make a pod that can go full brown on the plant and STILL has seed that is bright green at that point, I probably never will.
Rice Bean box
Again, this previous seasons produce is not in the picture. I also realize I forgot to include the tan/cream. There are quite a lot of those now, so they are in their own container
Do not pay to much attention to the sections. Originally I wanted to divide the seed by what brand of rice beans they were, as well as the seed coat color, in an effort to prove conclusively that the rice bean type that the adzukis are found in are the only ones that are short enough season to produce at all up here, and the commoner type will not. However as with last year I managed to forget which cell had which brand, so next year is going to be another planting by color only; I'll just have to hope I can do a better job keeping them discrete next year.
A few of the sections here also have "special" seeds (actually ALL of the flat reds in there are "specials". Some are there for being very short and fat seeds, which I am saving on the off chance that rice beans and adzukis can interbreed, and those are hybrids. There are also a few I pulled out of bags of black cowpeas I bought last year, which I am saving since those bags come from Thailand, not China (and so may represent a strain different than most of the ones I am working with).
The mottled cell in the back row has a lot of beans I found in senna which again may be a different strain. Actually that may be the wild strain again, Vinga umbillifera gracilis .
The bottom row also has a cell for black seeds, though those don't get planted in their own section. There really are no full on "black" rice beans, they pretty much all change when soaked. After soaking I tend to simply go through, and divide them into dark dark red (which I throw away) and red with extremely heavy mottling (which gets added to the red mottle population) Blue is similar, it gets added to the cream/tan with mottle because that is really what it is, mottled cream with the mottle really heavy)
The pinto cell does get planted on it's own, but I have yet to get results from that. Unfortunately it seems that pinto may ONLY exist in the long season population (and it's incredibly rare there) so getting pinto back may actually be impossible for me.
The vial is my oldest seed I have from my own grow outs. The original was completely from volunteers which is why it is all red (I didn't start getting cream or mottled material until two or three years ago, and seed that was both only started showing up last year)
As with the adzukis a lot of the rice beans sort of toe the line with regards to getting pods off before the fall frost. Added onto the slowness is my tendency to pull pods too soon. This is due partly due to impatience (which I suppose is correctable) and partly because I can't count on them staying closed when they dry down. Fully domestic rice beans don't shatter, but wild ones do, and what I have covers the full spectrum (I have had a pod on one really wild one basically shatter in my hand) It's actually one of the big ironies, while I go to such length to keep the mottled skins in the mix (they're basically gone from most of the mixes and getting rarer in the ones that still have them) those mottled seed coats come along with a LOT of other traits, most of which are very BAD for actual growing for food (tiny plants, tiny seeds, few pods, pods that shatter etc.). As I work to save them I have to concede that their elimination is probably exactly what should be going on.
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Post by darrenabbey on Jan 30, 2015 18:52:36 GMT -5
awesome! thanks for posting the images and further discussion of your collection.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 30, 2015 19:19:13 GMT -5
I'll try and do a few more from time to time. At least of the stuff that is visually of note. A lot of the actual weeds are not particularly photogenic of seed, so there's no real point (at least until someone starts hunting EXACTLY the same sources I do, and needs a photo guide to what they are finding). Though I may do some, as some are actually quite pretty in their own way. Spurred Butterfly pea seeds have this nice three tone effect (middle brown seeds, dark brown streaks, yellow outlines on the streaks) Cajanus scaraboides looks like a pile of microscopic cigars that someone dipped in lacquer. And the pods of Medicago muricoleptis look so much like tiny seashells that, if I had the skills, I'd probably sacrifice a few to be cast in precious metal to be used as jewelry accents.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 31, 2015 18:33:42 GMT -5
Next photo round
The Cowpea box
Again, this year's production is not in the picture. I was mostly medium sized brown seeds with black speckles. At least one of them I'll probably re-plant at some point, as a quick taste test of one of the pods proved it to be unusually sweet.
Unlike the rice bean and adzuki boxes this box does actually have a few named strains (and I don't mean ones I named myself) The small white ones are rice peas, one of the tan containers is African Field and one of the mottled cells should be Avakli. But given I tend to forget which is which by now they probably also have other cowpeas that looked the same I tossed in.
Coals in the Candle (my white podded black seeded cowpea) is in the little plastic bag in the lower second to the right cell)
The mottled seed in the bottom left cells is one of my better performers. In fact, it's one of the only ones that has gone two generations (that is, the seed here is from seed I grew from seed I found)
A few of the seeds here also demonstrate unusually deeply recessed hila (deep enough that early on I thought they were some other species) When I get around to planting them I may have some problems getting them out of the pods (those deep scars may hold tighter).
The Toffee container has the "mottled eye" cowpeas in it
One thing that is NOT here I hope will be before planting time is that pale podded year long bean that shows up in limited quantities in Chinatown around very early spring. The one whose seeds are a sort of yin-yang of white and mottled red.
group 2
one of the screw top sets. Upper right are the spurred butterfly pea seeds. Upper left are the Cajanus scaraboides.
I'm not 100% sure but I think that the seed on the lower right is bladderpod licorice, Glycyrrhiza inflata . Though it could also be some sort of Sesbania
I actually don't know what the lower left stuff is yet. It's sort of similar to the C. scaraboides (though not identical) so maybe another sort of Cajanus. I think I saw a picture of seed like in in a book marked as Phaseolus tetraspermum but the book had a LOT of misidentifications so that attribution is not exactly reliable.
The Medicago muricoleptis pods
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Post by blueadzuki on Feb 2, 2015 16:33:28 GMT -5
Today, we cover mung beans  Like adzukis, mung beans come in more colors that the industry standard (light green), though not quite as many. Mung beans divide broadly into two groups, macro and micro. Macro are slightly bigger, usually more rounded and a somewhat duller shade of green. Micro tend to be smaller my cylindrical (due to the seeds apressing more closely in the pod) and a somewhat brighter shade. The ones at the top of the picture are macro's most of the bottom are micros The commonest color after green is yellow. This is because the normal green shade actually is made of two pigments, a green one and a yellow one. And having the green one fail is not at all uncommon (in fact it is not unusual to find seeds where it has failed on part so you get a seed with yellow and green patches) In fact there are strains (like one of the ones zeedman has) that produce ONLY yellow seeds. However since most of the yellow strains are macro, which has a brown component to the color as well as the green and yellow ones, these groups tend to be a sort of dirty brownish yellow. Micro yellows on the other hand (like those in the picture) are rarer but in my opinion much prettier since without the brown the color is closer to a brilliant canary-gold. When the reverse occurs the resultant seed is a very deep, almost blue green the macros on the top sort of have that as do some of the micros in the middle. It is also possible to get green with darker green mottling on top. the little group in the middle of the top row has that. Brown is unclear I can't tell if they are a legit color or simply discoloration. The reddish brown one in the top row may actually have some sort of planting powder on it given the hilum is dyed bright fuchsia. There may also be black, but to be truthful I'm not sure. Back when the herb shop had mungs by the scoop I would regularly find macro mungs that seems to be black. However when I got them home and looked at them under better light they invariably turned out to be 1.dark brown and 2. spoiled seed (their cots had turned the brownish shade of spoiled seeds). The one micro slightly off center in the middle may be a legit black, but it could just as easily be very very dark green. the two very, very small seeds at the bottom right may be wild mungs, I can't tell. |
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Post by blueadzuki on Feb 5, 2015 12:12:38 GMT -5
2/5/15
Report from this week is rather bleak
As I said last week, I had to go back to the rice bean brand I was getting from Manhattan, which is MUCH less rich in any of the things I actually want. total alternate color adzuki yield from 6 bags (4 1/2 pounds) was maybe 12 or so beans all but 2 of which were some shade of tan (i.e. the commonest color after the base red) and one of those two which I thought was black turned out to 1. be dark red and 2. be damaged on the back. If I wasn't becoming so convinced that the rice bean shipments to this country are disappearing (so that it will probably not be long before getting ANY additional material will be near impossible) I'm not sure I'd bother.
And I'm not sure how long THAT supply will last, I can't help noticing that the shelf I am getting them from isn't being re-filled.
That was pretty much the only seed I got this week. My health food store with the soybeans is in the process of moving further up the street, so they were closed (to make things worse, I can't seem to find the business card they gave me, and without that, I can't tell WHERE up the street they are moving (no English on the moving sign) so until I do, I can't follow up.
I did buy a bag of larger adzukis from a different herb shop since I though I found a black adzuki in it, but again it turned out to be dark red (until I actually am about to plant and can soak them, I'm not 100% sure that those adzukis actually HAVE any actual black ones, they could ALL be deep red [there are occasional tan ones in there, but not frequently enough to make serious effort pursuing them especially since, as I said, tan isn't all that uncommon (though the ones I get from there are unusually large as the base beans are).
The one tiny thread of hope I got from that trip is it finally took me by the Flushing branch of Wah Fung (the herb shop chain that was providing all that goot material when I was in Manhattan earlier this year.) They don't have rice beans either (there's no bin for them so it's probably gone for good) but they DO still have a mung bean bin. There wasn't anything usable by me IN there, but since the usable mungs are seasonal and for a pretty short season, it could just be the wrong time and as the year progresses, the good stuff could come back. So in theory my supply of the larger salt and pepper adzukis may not be totally cut off.)
I suppose pretty soon I'll be making the trip to the Malaysian place. probably not next week (the Manhattan trip takes a lot of time, and the area in Flusing I want to scout for lunch is a bit too far from that market to do both and Manhattan in the same day. And see what little I can glean from there (I don't really need the small red cowpeas they sell, but on rare occasions a rice bean shows up in one of those bags, and since that would be one from outside of China (I think the bags are Thai) that could be of use.
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Post by blueadzuki on Mar 4, 2015 16:22:49 GMT -5
3/4/15
Sorry it's been so long since an update but it's been a bit of a trial getting back up to speed (for those who are out of the loop, I spent most of the week before last in the hospital (severely infected wound on my back, compounded by an undiagnosed case of diabetes (probably type II) Don't worry I'm much better now). I DID make it in last week, but much later than normal (I had to wait for the visiting nurse to come and change my dressing) so I was a little rushed and didn't do much.
Not a lot to report hunt wise, in any case. I did find an herb shop that has rice beans, but the actual take from there isn't all that good. The stuff is rich in mottled creams (oddly it's really low in unmottled creams and mottled reds, which are usually more common that mottled creams) but not a lot else (one bindweed seed and a few small soybeans.
There's a second shop, but I think their rice beans are lion (since there is a pile of sealed lion bags next to the bin. I pulled a few tan adzukis from there, but not a lot else worthwhile
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Post by blueadzuki on Mar 12, 2015 11:03:43 GMT -5
3/11/15
Back from another trip
Got my usual small sample of rice beans from the herb shop, Actually it was a touch smaller than usual, since I lost part of it (I went to pick up my bag when I was done to tie it, and discovered that there was a large slit in the bottom the contents were leaking out from. I managed to grab most of the important one, but I'm sure a few mottles got stuck in the bin below.
The one piece of good news from that trip is that it looks like that shop got a bag of the right kind of mung beans, so I was able to add 3 more of the large salt and pepper adzukis to my supply.
Speaking of rice beans, I have good news and bad news on that front. The good news is that the store that had the "good" bags of rice beans finally restocked their supply of bags. The bad news is that they restocked with the Golden Lion brand i.e. the only one I really cannot use EVER. It has a few off color beans and still the odd other seed or two, but not a lot, and to be honest the sheer filthiness of the beans in those bags makes me reluctant to deal with them. How this brand has become the dominant one in rice beans (and seems to be inching slowly towards becoming the ONLY brand sold in this area) is beyond me. I don't even want to TOUCH the things, I can't imagine anyone willing to EAT them. So they're off the list now.
I did pick up a few bags (NOT golden lion) at a different market. They had some odd and ends (a few bindweed seeds, three spurred butterfly peas) and at least I got a fair handful of red mottled seeds (with one of the brands being sold in the bins having mostly tan mottled and the other kind basically having almost no mottled at all, I can easily see a point where, unless my own crop starts performing better, I'll have to occasionally buy bags just to keep up what I consider "basic" off colors.) The real question is whether that is enough to keep going back. None of those things are ones I am particularly low on at the moment. Maybe next week I'll pick up a few bags of that new to me brand I saw on the other side of town and see if there is more to it than a cursory outside glance suggested.)
I probably should also do a run to one of then H-marts there, to check on the status of the mixed beans. While I don't need any more of the cowpeas NOW, there is always the chance that my crop this year will be devoured again (like last year) and I am not sure of the status . I THOUGHT the kind I needed was still coming in at some times of the year but last time I went to my branch they only had one bag and it was the wrong kind. That might mean there was simply a run on the mix (why I have no clue) or it could mean H-mart is phasing it out, and I need to scramble to build up supplies.
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Post by blueadzuki on Mar 17, 2015 13:06:08 GMT -5
Went back to my local H-mart last Friday, and the news is mixed. The shelf was refilled, but it was refilled with bags of the "wrong" mix, with a new label design (same company, just new label)
This may or may not have a meaning on the future. If the label change is just that, a label change and my guesses about the contents are correct (that they switch from the "right" to the "wrong" mix as seasonal supplies come in or out) no real issue; the stuff I want will return in time
If on the other hand, the label change coincides with the adoption of a new supplier for their cowpeas (or equally likely a new cowpea being grown by the supplier) and the reason I was finding bags with the old label and the new contents is that the contents changed before the label did, I may be running on borrowed time.
I assumed that the former was correct based on the fact that I found a supply of old bags at the store after I first saw the new ones, but it now occurs to me that that may not be a lead pipe cinch of an argument. H-mart (or the company that packs the mix) may have a storage warehouse somewhere (in fact, they probably do) and depending on how they stack the boxes there, it might be easily possible for a box going out to a store to in fact have come into the warehouse before the box sent to that store previously did. I am aware that "first in, first out" is a cornerstone of good grocery stocking practice (as indeed it should be) but on a product with as long a shelf life as dried beans, it may not be followed as rigorously by the shippers as it could be (Certainly a lot of the shopkeepers don't seem to bother; new bags are USUALLY simply stacked on top of what was already there. Or why I (to the annoyance of many store owners) have to go through the WHOLE bin to get what I am after (as opposed to simply taking the top x bags, like most people do.)
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