Photos of Common Beans

[Joseph Lofthouse]

This week I started harvesting the earliest of the early dry beans. I'm picking individual pods right now.

First Harvest. 2015-08-26


Again this year, the yellow tiger bean dominates the earliest harvests. Pinto beans and pink beans are producing well.

Harvest. 2015-08-28


2015-08-28. Sorted by type.


I made another harvest on the 29th, but haven't threshed them yet.

This is what the patch looked like on 2015-07-17.


Here's what the bean patch looked like a week ago. Yes! That's a 150 foot long row of runner beans!

[reed]

I might have found a cross. I thought I had one last year when I found some all red  beans in my rattlesnake but there was just a few and I didn't find them till planting time. They are growing now and have just a couple pods as rabbits ate them down a couple times, sill curious to see what the will look like. This is better though as I noticed these much larger pods in my Ideal Market beans and I know for sure only black Ideal Market seeds were planted on this trellis section plus I never had a beans that looked like these. Last year the Ideal Markets grew near KY Wonders and Brown Greasy but other beans were also in the general vicinity. I'm excited cause we really like all those kinds.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

There is always the possibility that originally they were red, and what your seeing is ancient dormant genes suddenly becoming active. Just a thought

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Dry bean harvest from 2015-08-29: I'm still calling this the 'Very Early' harvest.



I'm calling these yellow tiger beans, red beans, pink beans, peruanos, white beans, pinto beans, pink kidney beans, and little yellow beans that came out of Carol Deppe's Resilient Bean Breeder. About half of Carol's beans were culled the first year due to being too long season for my garden. And today, one of them has went on to become one of my quickest maturing beans.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I ended up collecting (about) 38 varieties of dry bush beans that I am calling "early". The 9 varieties on the lower/left side of the photo are sibling groups (early bush types) from the oxbowfarm hybrid clade.



Here is what the early harvest looked like last year:



Here is what a sample of the early harvest looks like this year. The most obvious difference is that the little pink bean, that was a minor component of the landrace last year, is a major component this year. That white/purple bean that was so prominent last year was present this year, but not in high enough concentration to be included in the sample.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

This was the harvest from about 1 row of beans. I think I have 12 more rows that need to be picked soon.

[steev]

That's a pretty fine return.

[reed]

Here are some of the "across the road beans" planted in the corn and largely ignored after that except I did pick a couple messes to eat green. I planted a couple kinds both of which came from Bill Best's seed swap last year. One was called Cherokee Greasy Mix and the other Faulkner's Cornfield Bean. ( the Ohio Poles grew over there too but I'm keeping them separate. The ones sorted at top don't look like any of the ones planted. I especially like the little purpleish ones in the middle. Top left had pink / red pods. The five in top right are runner beans and the most closely appearing to the ones just to the left of them. I only had one purple runner bean seed last year and it  was planted in a different patch.  I wasn't surprised by some black ones as a few of them commonly show up when I grow white or brown greasys to dry for soup. The black with brown specks are new and hard to see. I suspect the occasional black is just something that happens in greasys sometimes. Lots of those gold colored ones for sure. They and the pink ones don't look like a typical greasy bean. 

 

[squishysquashy]

This is a neat thread!

And now the greenhorn gardener must survey the "landrace bean people":
When you eat your beans, do you separate out the varieties and colors or just throw em all in a pot together? Do you taste test each one separately?

[steev]

Oct 7, 2015 15:27:49 GMT -5 squishysquashy said:

This is a neat thread!

And now the greenhorn gardener must survey the "landrace bean people":
When you eat your beans, do you separate out the varieties and colors or just throw em all in a pot together? Do you taste test each one separately?

Not quite a response to your query, but I've never liked multi-bean mixes due to variation of cooking time, depending on cultivar of bean. I could prolly do lots of research/record-keeping and make compatible mixes, or default to "just cook 'em to death", but I think single-bean cookery mostly suits my level of ambient sloth. It's kind of a moot question to me, so far, as I seem to have a dog's chance of growing P. vulgaris; I think shade structures will be the key, but wind is such an issue on the farm, that I've not worked out a reasonable way to break it, when I'm not there to do it personally.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I almost always cook beans as mixes.. Even if I grow them separate, I turn them into mixes before cooking. Some beans turn to mush almost immediately and make a rich broth, while other's stay firm no matter how long they are cooked. To me, that is the best of both worlds.... My cooking bean blend, which I call "Hundred Bean Soup Mix" contains 7 species of beans. Too bad that I haven't started growing soybeans yet. If I were making things with beans other than soups I might cook them separately.

I grew about 300 varieties of beans this summer. That would really be a project to cook each of them separately...

There is one bean that I would like to track down for cooking separately. Even after being cooked for a long time, it has a texture like lightly sauteed celery. I would really like that one separate... So far this year I haven't harvested the one that I think it is...

I grow beans both as blends and as separate varieties... For example, here are some of the beans that I harvested yesterday. Landrace style on the bed, and variety style in the bowl. The red kidney beans really pleased me last fall, and were a hit at the farmer's market, so I separated some of them out to plant as a variety. Yesterday there were a few off-type beans among them: anasazi beans. I suppose that I didn't do the sorting 100% accurately when I pulled the red kidney beans out of the landrace last winter.


And yes, it's that time of year when every available horizontal surface if covered with squash, or corn, or beans, or other seed crops that need to be spread out to dry. I even use the bed for 16 hours per day to dry beans.

[steev]

What; you can't share your bed with beans? Aren't you tired enough? It's not like they want the pillow.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

There are plenty of beans in my bed these days, and underfoot... My bedroom smells like a barnyard... I think that there must be something rotting in the potato bucket, but I'm too intent on harvesting to be sorting potatoes months before they need to be replanted.

[steev]

Rotting spuds? Stinky, but not so bad. The worst for me was when a fermenting gallon of milk blew out and started leaking through the uninsulated floor of the sleeping porch I rent; my landlady and the guy who lives in the garage were all upset. Tant pis!

[reed]

I'm more of a landrace person wanna be, I never heard the term till I found this forum about a year ago. For years if I mostly grew Kentucky Wonder or Blue Lake and we used them separate as green beans. I used to not even save seeds. For bush beans it was the same thing with Top Crop, Contender or Provider. Then I discovered other poles we liked for green beans like Ideal Market and Rattlesnake. I have grown a little brown speckled greasy bean for years and it was the only one I had that we used as a dry bean. Now I got lots of different greasy beans and find they all taste and cook similar so I want to make a "landrace" of them. I also want more variety in my dry beans like Anasazi and Speckled Cranberry but will probably keep growing them separate at least for now. I have added about a 1/2 dozen more kinds we like to can for green beans so I want to mix them all together in a sort of landrace. Then there are those, just two so far, NT 1/2 runner and Ohio Pole that I do want to keep separate.

I'm dumping bush beans entirely cause I hate stooping over to pick them for green beans and in my climate with wind storms and high humidity they aren't much use as dry. You just get a lot of half rotted mud splashed yuck. I am a much smaller scale that Joseph but still the living room floor, the bedroom floor and kitchen table are covered in beans and corn, all available space in both sheds are filled with beans that still need thrashed. It's a slippery slope.