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Post by reed on Sept 13, 2015 7:46:35 GMT -5
I planted a big white Lima bean called King of the Garden and this is what I got.    These don't look anything like the big flat white beans I planted, Anyone got a clue what they might be? |
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Post by flowerweaver on Sept 13, 2015 13:06:17 GMT -5
Can't see your photos, but many years ago I similarly planted all white King of the Garden Lima beans, and every pod produced red speckled beans like Calico or Christmas. They were from commercially purchased seed, so it was kind of surprising.
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Post by reed on Sept 14, 2015 7:31:14 GMT -5
flowerweaver, I don't know what has been the issue with my pictures. Do they display for you now? Hope I don't have to change hosts again. These were also commercial seed from a bulk bin at a local nursery. Don't remember the seed company name.
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Post by flowerweaver on Sept 14, 2015 15:44:30 GMT -5
Still can't see the photos, just a large grey circle with a minus sign in their places. Which host are you using? I like Flickr. Can you post a link to the images instead?
Mine were also from a bulk bin at a local nursery. I asked them once who their supplier was and they said Livingstone Seed Co. I've also grown something like a yellow gourd from their seeds that were supposed to be crookneck squash, so I don't buy seeds there anymore.
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Post by reed on Sept 14, 2015 17:02:18 GMT -5
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Post by flowerweaver on Sept 14, 2015 17:42:00 GMT -5
You can get a free Flickr account, it may have ads, I don't know since I pay. Yes, I can see the links. Lovely!...are all of them coming out this way? I must admit I think they are way more interesting than King of the Garden. But they don't look like my surprise of Calico/Christmas. You might just have a new variety on your hands if you can stabilize it. Save me some  I've got 22 varieties of Limas growing and the bumblebees are really working them. Next year I should have some interesting grow outs! |
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Post by jondear on Sept 14, 2015 18:17:47 GMT -5
Cool looking beans...
I planted some 242's this year. About half came up due to the massive rain we received right after they started coming up. I filled in the the skips in the row with Thorogreen or something similar that was locally available. Both ended up doing well enough to start drying some on the vine. Some years we don't even get shell beans let alone dry ones, yay!
But I got wondering if any crosses show themselves how the cyanogen levels would be. Maybe a through back to wild traits? I have no way to test for any unhealthy compounds appearing in the offspring. I can't be the only one kind of wondering about this sort of stuff. Maybe I'm being over cautious, but I grow food for health reasons as well as culinary reasons. I'd hate to put anything less than wholesome on my dinner table.
Thoughts?
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Post by philagardener on Sept 14, 2015 19:52:35 GMT -5
Cyanogens are thought to protect plants from leaf damage by insects and animals, so it is possible that you might use that as an indicator in the field (and, in fact, give a second thought to selecting for plants that show minimal damage. That is an interesting take on things, isn't it!)
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Sept 14, 2015 22:50:39 GMT -5
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Sept 14, 2015 22:56:30 GMT -5
Poisons in beans (in most vegetable species) tend to be well behaved... They taste poisonous to me... I'm not selecting against bean poisons, because traditional cooking methods are to cook beans till they are about mush, which degrades the poisons. An easy time for tasting for bean poison is just as the pod starts to dry down.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Sept 15, 2015 0:15:28 GMT -5
Right, it's probably a bad idea to select for almond-scented lima beans.
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Post by reed on Sept 15, 2015 4:06:40 GMT -5
I wasn't aware it was much of an issue except in hyacinth beans. If it tastes or smells anything like almonds it won't be an issue anyway, I hate almonds and would probably discard anything that tasted like them, poison or not.
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Post by blueadzuki on Sept 15, 2015 13:17:23 GMT -5
It's sort of an issue with a lot of other less commonly grown (and hence less heavily bred) beans. Guar would be a good example. Eating the immature pods as a veggie is fine, but you wouldn't want to eat the mature seeds as is (thier gum is another matter, the processing removes whatever the problem things are) especially if you have a very dark seeded version (my found samples have a few seeds that are jet black, and I often wonder if it might not be better to rouge those out at planting for my own safety.
Wing Beans would be another good example. I understand that you can eat mature seeds (they are supposed to be sort of nutritionally equivalent to soybeans) but if I was to put it into practice, I'd feel much more secure doing it if the wingbean strain I was using was one of the ones whose seeds were tan, as opposed to brown (the norm) or black
Or Grasspea. Color and ODAP/BAPN levels are closely tied, so if you are growing to eat, go white or as pale as you can (of course here there is a tradeoff, since the higher the levels of the nasty stuff is, the more drought resistance it has, and the more brightly colored the flowers.)
Actually I tend to look at black seeds from ANY legume where it is not the norm color with a little trepidation. There are some where I know it to be safe, common beans, limas, runners, soy, chickpeas etc. But show me black seed of something whose seed is normally quite pale, like horse gram or mothe bean and I get a little edgy. As the show up commercially (a smattering in a three or four pound bag) they are of course safe, but if I through selection made a population that was ALL black seeded, it might be another matter.
Similar reasons is also why I may never get around to actually eating the "wild" mung beans I have in my small bean collection, when I get around to growing them. Not knowing HOW wild thier genes are I worry they might be on the wrong side of the "safety" divide. I might use the product of my wild soybeans when I get around to growing them, but if I do, it will be in my hair, not my mouth.
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Post by steev on Sept 15, 2015 19:40:49 GMT -5
I avoid the black seeds that have the little white skull and cross-bones; they make nice earrings, though.
Years ago, I was at a Rare Seeds meeting where the featured speaker was a veteran almond farmer from Modesto; she'd brought raw samples of six varieties for taste-testing to illustrate relative levels of cyanide (all well within limits, all commercial); to me, the one listed as having the most cyanide was clearly the most tasty, un-toasted; the "good" ones were all more bland and blah. I think it's like those "stinky" melons, which "must be overripe, because the ones in the market don't smell at all."
Actually, I'm pretty sure my moderate ingestion of foods containing a little cyanide is what has kept termites out of my wooden leg. Oops, gotta go; there's Moby Dick!
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Post by blueadzuki on Sept 15, 2015 20:31:54 GMT -5
There actually could be a good reason for that. Remember that the cyanide in almonds (and other stone fruits) isn't actually toxic HCN yet, it's amygdalin. Amygdalin has to be digested to form into the HCN that is dangerous to us, and that digestion releases other products like glucose and importantly benzaldehye i.e. the compound that makes almonds smell (and presumably taste) like almonds. So logically, the more cyanide the almond has, the more benzaldehyde and hence, the more almond-y it will be. That's sort of why people still grow and use bitter almonds for other products; more cyanide more benzaldahyde, more aromatic bang for your buck. So a very low cyanide almond presumably is going to ipso facto be a low bezadehyde almond and a bland almond.
Actually that makes me wonder. Since the poison in almonds doesn't show up until our bodies digest the amygdalin, does that mean there are people out there who are immune to almond poisoning. You need a specific enzyme to do the digestion. A lot of animals (like squirrels and birds) don't have the enzyme (why is why they don't drop dead from eating all those plum apricot and cherry pits in the fall.) Logically there are presumably some people who don't make it either (there are few things in the human body that there aren't a few people in the world who don't have a genetic kink that makes that product not be produced.) More importantly, could there be some sort of medication one could take to denature the enzyme before it could go to work? I doubt it would be worth the trouble of making such a medication, but it should be theoretically possible.
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