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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jan 17, 2015 2:43:06 GMT -5
Jack in the Beanstalk...a cautionary tale. What? Joseph? You need 20 more beans? Pole? Bush? Dry? : with the most recent box you sent I'm way over 100 varieties of common beans. It's just a matter of getting them all into the ground on planting day. Now I've got my sights set on 500 varieties... I'll probably achieve that this growing season. oxbowfarm sent a packet of bean seeds that are segregating hybrids of a cross of a cross. And the Brown Trout cross is expected to produce lots of segregates this summer. I'm doing pretty well these days with common beans, favas, teparies, garbanzos, and peas. I'm gonna give soybeans another chance this summer. Perhaps this will be the year that the cowpeas become adapted to my fields. Maybe next... I'll give rice beans and asparagus beans another try. I have my heart set on being able to grow runner beans like my grandfather did. They might even get spoiled this year after last year's sunflower disaster. |
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Post by reed on Jan 17, 2015 7:26:11 GMT -5
Also, I started opening bean flowers last year and said out loud "you've got to be kidding me"..... Those blossoms aren't fat finger friendly at all.  Fat fingers, got that, one slightly paralyzed from a knife slip... while building bean trellis. Annoying bi-focal glasses, got that. Manipulating bean flowers should be easy. |
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Post by reed on Jan 17, 2015 7:49:52 GMT -5
12540dumont, It's too late, beans under the couch cushions, beans under the bed, beans in the butter dish, trellis for runner beans is already up. Family won't make eye contact, bean and corn are four letter words. They don't even know about carrots, potatoes, squash ....
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Post by ferdzy on Jan 17, 2015 11:08:05 GMT -5
Hah, what a good thing we all have each other. We can bore our families, but not completely alienate them by blowing off some vegetable steam here.
As for beans, my goal this year is to cross Cherokee Trail of Tears with Blue Lake S7. I've only had two or three crosses show up in my garden, and as far as I can see, the father has always been Cherokee Trail of Tears. That's not why I'm choosing it; I just hope that makes it easier. CToT has shown a fair bit of resistance to the anthracnose we've had the last couple of years. Blue Lake does not; but Blue Lake is my favourite bean for freezing, so we grow a lot of it. Blue Lake is white seeded and very uniform and productive; CToT is black seeded and quite diverse in colour/shape/number of pods produced per plant. So far as flavour goes, they are quite similar. So ultimately, I'd like to end up with something like Blue Lake again, only with anthracnose resistance added.
I have to admit given how little beans cross in my garden I'm not really inclined to landrace them, but I grew out one of my crosses this year and got a mixture of white, black, brown, yellow, and speckled beans of similar shape and size. I wasn't crazy about any of them by themselves, but they look so pretty as a mix! I will see if they continue to keep the same size and shape - which I think will be important for even cooking - and if so, they will make a good "landrace".
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Post by reed on Jan 17, 2015 18:28:51 GMT -5
ferdzy, have you tried Ideal Market? Very similar to CT of T except less strings and less purple coloring. Produce a little better too I think. Thankfully never had much problem with anthracnose but a few KY Wonder leaves looked a little funky last year, might have been overkill but I ripped out the whole bunch of em.
I'm not sure what I will do in crosses. Was thinking of taking one or two plants of several kinds and pollinating different flowers on each of them with each of the others. Then growing the surprises and doing it again.
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Post by ferdzy on Jan 18, 2015 9:52:49 GMT -5
I haven't heard of Ideal Market. I'll keep an eye out for it.
Yeah, when the anthracnose showed up I wasted a month going, "WTH is that!? That doesn't look good." Yeah, it wasn't. Next time, next time...
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Post by reed on Feb 12, 2015 20:27:34 GMT -5
Maybe if I want to make a bean landrace I should start paying attention: That big bunch around the bottom and left are Rattlesnake. The two top right look like maybe I accidentally dumped in a coupe of Kentucky Wonder. The light pile in the middle and the dark four at the top are maybe just variation within Rattlesnake but I have never ever planted any beans that look like the ones in the box. Maybe I already got the start of a landrace and didn't even know it. Now to look at all my other seeds and see if anything pops out. I got some odd Cherokee TT but think they might just be malformed cause of poor conditions while maturing. I don't have any idea what might have grown near these in years past so no way to even guess what might have crossed with them.  |
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Post by Al on Mar 2, 2015 6:26:12 GMT -5
This thread has inspired me to try a bit of bean crossing, I will have Cherokee TOT & Sultana on the plot next to each other this year. Cherokee has a small black bean but I have been told the pods are not great for eating green, Sultana has a small white bean white & is good eating at all stages. What will come of a mixture?
I do like dry black turtle beans in a chilli con carne so dry beans a bit bigger than Cherokee would be a result, & earliness is desirable here in northern Europe. Should I just shop around for different varieties to try or risk descent into the murky world of the beaniac breeder? I fear early symptoms are already evident, such as planting shop bought chick peas & white kidney beans from the larder, perhaps I should try turtle beans too?
I all too familiar with the glazed eye regard from family as allium fixation has already been diagnosed, discussions about any foray into bean crossing will have to strictly confined to this forum or I will just be written off as the swivel-eyed loon with onions AND beans in his pockets.
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Post by flowerweaver on Mar 2, 2015 12:13:00 GMT -5
Haven't seen much crossing in my beans either ferdzy. I think there are way too many delectable wildflowers blooming here at the same time that both my bees and the wild ones prefer. This year I'm scaling back on the pumpkins to add more room and an additional strip field for beans. I haven't made my complete list yet, but I think I will be sowing about 200+ kinds. Some are from what's left after the tornado of my landrace project, many are from kind friends who have gifted me with seeds from their various bean projects (from which I expect some exciting segregating), and some rare and in need of increasing in a longer season for others. |
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Post by DarJones on Mar 2, 2015 18:05:55 GMT -5
I set a rather ambitious goal a couple of years ago when I found Oaxacan 5-1 (PI 207373) which is available from ARS-Grin. beans.agsci.colostate.edu/Publications/4.%20Fusarium%20Wilt.pdfThis is a small black bean in a pod about 5 inches long. Flowers are deep pinkish purple. Heat tolerance is the best I've seen including all common commercial beans such as Rattlesnake. It is not day length sensitive in my climate. Quantity of beans produced is relatively high though volume produced is poor as expected given bean size. Most important to me is that disease tolerance is off the scale better than any other bean I've grown. I got seed and multiplied it from about 20 in the original package to a few hundred seed which I then interplanted with Fortex in 2014. Carpenter bees worked the blossoms heavily. I have a package of about 300 seed saved from the Fortex beans that will be planted this year. How will I know the hybrids? The pink flower trait is dominant, all I have to do is grow the beans and save seed from any pink flowered plants. There is still a long process of screening and selecting to be done. From discussion with Jim Myers at OSU, I will likely have to make at least one back cross to Fortex to get rid of undesirable traits such as small size, heavy strings, etc. |
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Post by 12540dumont on Mar 3, 2015 2:01:44 GMT -5
Dar, Are strings and color associated?
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Post by ottawagardener on Mar 3, 2015 13:27:34 GMT -5
You want more beans Joseph (or others) as I'll happily send some next year just let me know.
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Post by ottawagardener on Mar 3, 2015 13:27:40 GMT -5
People keep sending me masses of them.
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Post by reed on Mar 1, 2016 15:29:57 GMT -5
I'v been thinking more on how to make bean crosses and since hand pollinating individual flowers is not something I am likely to do I think I came up with a workaround. I have a theory that if you have a lot of bumble bees like we do that bean crosses happen on their own a lot more than commonly thought. The problem is that the cross may only be a single bean in all the crop, it doesn't show up visually the year it happens and most is harvested to eat. There was a cross or two in there but you never knew it.
What if for example in a row of p. vulgaris a person plants just one or two seeds of a different variety or species to serve as mothers. Now as the bees do their job chances are much higher that a cross on to the different plant will occur just because most of the near by pollen is from the other variety. Then you just save and plant all of the seed from that plant. I bet you might have new crosses pop up all over the place. You could even know who the father was so it might be possible to make selected crosses this way instead of just random ones.
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Post by reed on Mar 2, 2016 9:44:15 GMT -5
I was re-reading Carol's most recent book last night and she says that crossing between two beans grown side by side is around 5%. If that is the case then growing a couple of one in a patch of another should bring that percentage up even higher. I'm pretty sure she was talking about two varieties of p vulgaris. I'm starting to think p vulgaris crosses are probably fairly easy to make.
Now I'm wondering what the percent of crossing could be achieved between other species. What I really want is some crosses with wild beans, p polystachios or runner beans, p coccineus to make a nice productive perennial that will grow here. Using limas, P lunatus is certainly not out of the question either. Guess I'm in for a long haul to find out which ones will cross with which and what comes out of it when they do.
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