Photos of Common Beans

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I finished harvesting the beans that I am calling "Joseph's Earliest Landrace, Dry Bush Beans". Here is what the seeds look like. This lot is so diverse that the term "Bush Bean" is somewhat of a misnomer. They are non-vining and non-climbing beans, but some of them have tendrils to some degree or other, and the extent of the tendrils varies from year to year based on micro-environment and/or micro-experience. There are 6 varieties represented that are new to my garden this year. The bean with a purple stripe on a white background showed up for the first time last summer. I separated it out and replanted. It grew true to type (purple on white). The other new beans are the purple beans on the top towards the left, and the Cranberry beans in the top right corner, and the Appaloosa beans just to the left of them, and those tiny little beans just below the Appaloosas, and the black and white Calypso beans, and the Jacob's Cattle or Anasazi beans in the bottom right corner. I kept Carol Deepe's Resilient bean breeder separate last year, but they are combined this year. They are the small yellow/black/brown beans towards the left of the photo.



Here's a high resolution image.

Last year's "Earliest" looked like this. Mostly the same varieties showing up again this year, although the proportions vary. I kept the tepary and common beans separate this year, but there is one row in the common bean patch that looks more like teparies to me. I hope that I pay attention to harvest them separate. There is also a row of cowpeas and a row of soybeans... Those are different enough that I will definitely keep them separate at harvest.

[raymondo]

Glorious. I love beans. Thanks for the great picture.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Raymondo: You're welcome. I love beans too. Here's another photo of what I harvested this morning.

Last winter a collaborator sent me seeds from a natural occurring bean cross discovered in his garden. They looked about like the black and dark brown bean that I marked with a red dot. Here is what the F2 generation looks like: Oh my. There is more variation than shown in this photo, because this is just the earliest picking. The sibling group has a very wide range of days-to-maturity.

[richardw]

Great photo of your seasons collection Joseph,ive even used your high resolution image for my desktop back ground

[raymondo]

Fantastic level of diversity.

[12540dumont]

Joseph, ehhmmm. Maybe in Utah, you're beans are all bush beans. Here, some of them are mezza lunga.....I haven't had a chance to pick them yet. But they did try to grab me when I went by. Did you plant these by color? I did a special batch of the yellow ones. But they all seemed to do better when I left them in a group.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Sept 8, 2014 21:38:16 GMT -5 12540dumont said:

Joseph, ehhmmm. Maybe in Utah, you're beans are all bush beans. Here, some of them are mezza lunga.....I haven't had a chance to pick them yet. But they did try to grab me when I went by. Did you plant these by color? I did a special batch of the yellow ones. But they all seemed to do better when I left them in a group.

Wait till you see my okra if I ever get seed to share. If it grows 4 feet tall for me, perhaps it'll grow 10 feet tall for some of you in warmer climates.

Labels become such a problem when growing genetically diverse crops... I need a word to use other than 'bush' beans and 'pole' beans... There are some varieties, such as 'Pink Kidney" that grow 9" tall, and never send out a tendril and stand as straight and tall as can be. Other varieties such as 'Little Pink Bean' grown 9" tall, and send out tendrils all over everywhere, but won't climb a pole for nothing. Some are mid-way between those two extremes. And then there are 'pole' beans which grow huge long tendrils that twist tightly around anything they get close to. Those are definitely not bush beans!

I sorted the beans before planting, and sowed rows of like colors together. And I also planted unsorted 'bulk' seed just as it was harvested. I figure that the sorted planting helps to bulk up the varieties that are under represented, while the 'bulk' planting is more about productivity, because the plants that produce the most offspring have a greater chance of reproducing than the meagerly productive so there are more highly productive seeds in the bulk mix than in the sorted seeds.

The F1 seeds of that hybrid looked all the same: A dark brown and black speckled bean.

I'm in the midst of my 'frost emergency' harvest. The dry beans aren't harmed by frost so I'm taking a temporary break from harvesting beans. They can be harmed by the rain that precedes the frost, but at this point the damage is already done. And in any case, the melons are harmed more by rain/frost than the beans, so I'm focusing on harvesting melons, squash, and tomatoes.

[kyredneck]

Haven't weighed them, guessing 2-3 lbs. of John Allen cut short Appalachian type bean saved from from 2014 season; along the same order as Greasy Grits except much earlier being somewhat of a half runner to boot (4' ft. vines at the max). Delicious full bean flavor, tender till....well, it's good and tender till the end, it NEVER gets fibrous, and it's early to bear to boot. It just doesn't bear till frost like some of the others, but it definitely has it's place in the grand scheme of things.



Have bean will trade.

[steev]

That's looking good; we'll discuss. I may have figured out how to get P vulgaris to work on my farm.

[silverleaf]

Oh my goodness, how wonderful! I love the variety there. Fingers crossed that I can be inspired by that in my own landrace projects - those beans are beautiful.

You know what might be fun? A little experiment - if a bunch of us in different places with different conditions started with exactly the same mix of easy-to-distinguish beans and grew them as landraces, and we compared photos of the results over the years. It would be interesting to see the differences and how the mixes changed over time.

[flowerweaver]

steev we both grow teparies and cowpeas, and suffer drought. Why is it I have no trouble growing vulgaris and you do? Is it a day or season length issue?

[steev]

I think it's a planting/climate thing. I've never gotten vulgaris growing early enough (usually hard frost through May) for them to produce before July's heat dries them up. Any that survive start to perk up in August. Right now, there are four vulgaris blooming (none maturing pods) and three lunatus blooming (maybe maturing pods); I don't really expect frost before November.

I'm thinking that when rain returns to more normal, I'll try planting in April (if the Winter's been warm), and late July.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I was working on a photography project today and found a photo of the F2 bean seeds that a collaborator sent me. (So much for my memory.) They were the result of a naturally occurring cross pollination that happened before he got the seed. The mother of the cross was Dutch Brown.

F2: D'Dutch Brown


F3: Dutch Brown Cross. This was the earliest harvest. Those yellow beans near the top/right of the photo look like the mother of this cross. I wonder who's the daddy?


And a closeup:

[Joseph Lofthouse]

This was one of my favorite beans this year. I found two beans like it during the 2013 growing season. It made a good showing for itself during 2014. It was early and prolific.

[jondear]

Cool beans.

If you're interested, I have a pole bean cross that showed up this year out of Fortex. The only other bean around was Northeaster.