Mystery Beans??

[reed]

When I was a little kid my dad had this thing about mosquitoes and every summer he sprayed the yard with God knows what. It didn't actually make me sick but it did something. I can't stand the smell of anything insecticide like even when other people don't even notice. Anything sprayed actually bothers me, spray paint, WD40, you name it, there is something common to that stuff (or my reaction to them) including herbicides that I can't tolerate, some worse than others. If I'm driving down the road I can smell a field that was sprayed weeks ago, if your house was treated for termites three months ago and I come visit I know it. If you use insect repellent on your skin or clothes I can't be around.  The modern "odor free" chemicals do it too, its more a sensation that a smell. 

My reaction to almonds is similar. Even the red part of some peaches close to the seed have it. Once it is in my mouth or nose I can't get rid of it. I don't know if exposure to those chemicals as a kid caused it somehow or if I was just that way already.

I ate a pod full of those beans raw to see if they had it and they didn't, so I'm happy.

[flowerweaver]

reed I'm kind of a miner's canary around chemical smells, too. There is a type of vinyl wallpaper used in offices that makes my eyelids swell shut in a matter of seconds. I once had a friend who worked in one of those offices and even the smell of it on his clothes at day's end would induce a reaction. He could never smell it. But after he changed jobs he called one day about that smell--suddenly he noticed it's absence instead.

I cannot handle the smell of WD40 because it contains fish oil, and I am deathly allergic to fish and seafood. I once worked in an office and riding in the elevator made me ill. Come to find out they kept it lubricated with WD40. I had to use the stairs.

No telling how many chemicals I was exposed to as a kid. My uncle who lived next door would routinely come over and spray my attempted organic garden against my wishes with chlordane because he didn't approve. Our water table was shallow. My mother died of cancer within a few years; he lived a long life but battled and succumbed to leukemia.

[jondear]

In common beans, I'm cautious with red beans. Dark red kidney beans should not be cooked in a crock pot. They need special treatment (soaking and boiling for a specified time for example) to be considered safe to eat. A crock pot may not get them to the proper temperature to reduce the toxin. Around here, you can only find light red kidney beans,I assume because the public is largely unaware of how to treat them.


I have a Romano type bush bean that I'll only eat as snaps because of the seed color. They guy that gave them to me said they make a good shellie and dry bean. He died of Lou Gehrigs several years ago. I have since read on the net about a possible connection. The year he gave me some beans to grow, I asked if they were dry enough to store and he bit into the bean to check. I remember him making a face and spitting to try to get the taste out of his mouth.

[reed]

It's good to know that possible toxins at least generally have a bad taste. I wonder if that is the taste I don't like in purple pod beans. I tend to taste about everything when I'm in the garden and raw purple pods have a lingering taste I don't like.

[reed]

Mystery solved! I looked at these beans and saw how much they shrink when dried and the shape and thought they just can't be limas or related to limas. 



I went across the road and found a few that were not too far matured and brought them in to try, they had strings as kyredneck said "like bailing twine" and appeared quite past where they should be good as a green bean. 


But,  I put them in a kettle anyway with a little salt pork as required by the hillbilly green bean protocol, section one,paragraph 4, I think and they came out looking like this.

Now if that don't look plum awful I don't know what does. Tough awful looking things but NOT! They are great even the pods not tough or chewy at all, really really good beans. The huge pods picked a little earlier would fill a lot of jars from not much space. The shellys could be canned alone if you wanted too. 

I went upstairs to the seed closet and dug out the beans I kept this spring and there they were, they are Ohio Pole Beans I got at the seed swap last year from Appalachian Heirloom Plant Farm. I have a nice bunch of seeds and am going to grow a big crop next year. No clue what happened to the King of Garden Limas but none of them showed. These grew in dense shade toward the middle of the corn patch. 

So mystery solved but never fear, I have another one. I went to take pictures of the beans with red flowers cause I never saw that before except in runners, very pretty. 


Then I picked a couple dry pods and found this, on the same plant. 


The flatish pods on the left had the bigger pink / purple and the other pods had the others. I have lots others that look like the tan ones and their pods but just the one vine with the red flowers. I ain't gonna do no good to go back to the seed cabinet because I know I never had beans like these. 

[Joseph Lofthouse]

reed: Looks like two plants to me... Runner beans with red flowers and purple seeds, and tanish colored common beans.

[reed]

I thought that too but I followed the vines down and it looked like they were all the same but the stems do vary in color. It is so jumbled up in there and I didn't want to tear them up so I can't 100% rule it out. After they dry down better I'll carefully take it all apart and see for sure if there is more than one plant. But I know I didn't plant any runner beans over there, although I do have some that look like that. Could be I'm losing my mind but that isn't likely cause I'm not sure I ever had it. There was a lot more of those red flowers hanging outside the fence but the deer ate them.

[blueadzuki]

Well, it's a long shot, but there are a few Runner beans that look sort of like the pale ones you have (we already know how many look like the pink ones). Ijevan #2 (which Ricters Seed Zoo carried five or six years ago but sold out quickly) looks almost the same
link

And we know that there are runner beans whose seeds are highly variable in seed coat characteristics, like Insuk's Wang Kong. So I imagine theoretically one could have a runner bean capable of throwing both black/brown mottled pink and mottled white. Maybe some sort of chimera, or something along the lines of a variegation. With plants whose leaves are mottled green and white, it isn't unknown for branches to develop whose leaves are wholly white and stems pink (for those plants where I have seen it, like Cuban Oregano and Variagted mint and such, pink in the stem is normal) if you did the same thing, but considering the gene for the pink/purple, you'd get much what you describe, a plant with some stems green instead of purpulish ( you didn't say explicitly, but I assume the stems of the pods whose seeds are white are the paler and greener of the two, the pink the purpler or browner.) And the seed from them lacking the pink as well (if it's the same pink).

The only snag in that theory is that, if that was the case, then the flowers on the green stems should have also been missing their color and be white. Unless the gene that controls the stem purple and the gene that controls the red flowers are different genes (they might be).

[kyredneck]

Sept 21, 2015 21:31:30 GMT -5 reed said:

Mystery solved! I looked at these beans and saw how much they shrink when dried and the shape and thought they just can't be limas or related to limas. 



I went across the road and found a few that were not too far matured and brought them in to try, they had strings as kyredneck said "like bailing twine" and appeared quite past where they should be good as a green bean. 

I got a couple beans marked like that:

"Rose = Family heirloom from the Rose family of Panola, in Madison Cty., Kentucky. It's a large bean pods go 9-10 inches or even longer. The beans are solid plum on one end, for about a third of their length, which then breaks into a frosting over ivory. It is, in fact, one of the prettiest of our mountain beans. Vines 7'- 8'.The beans are very meaty and tasty."

www.wrightsdaylily.com/beans.html

Picked up at the Berea swap last year.

That Ohio Pole and Rose Bean appear very similar from where I'm at.

"Strings like bailing twine" is a good thing. Immensely better than those beans with lil' fine strings that you have to fanaggle with to make sure you got it all. No wonder string beans have a bad rep.  

[reed]

kyredneck Yep, those sure do look very similar, I may try to get some of them at at this years swap. I was really surprised at how good the Ohio Pole's were. I expected such a big pod at such a mature stage to be tough and chewy. Next year I'll find how they are picked at a little bit younger stage.  
I went over yesterday and clipped off a bunch of the corn leaves to try to follow the stems of that other bean down, still can't tell for sure if it is one vine or two. The roots are a few feet away, it / they got carried over to the fence when the corn stalks fell over. I suspect now that Joseph Lofthouse is right that they are two plants but sure don't know where the runner bean looking one came from. It's seeds are half the size and different color than the other runners I have plus I didn't plant runners over there. I did find some more of them and confirmed they came from the red flowers. 

[reed]

kyredneck, did you grow out and sample those beans? I wonder if they taste good like the Ohio Pole does. How about the one that says it is a half runner, is it really? The Ohio Pole are are a very large vine. Speaking of so called half runners, do you know of any that really do only get 8' or less? I don't know that I'v ever planted a so called half runner that didn't get as tall as what ever it had to grow on, and then some. 

[kyredneck]

reed No, I've not grown either of those beans and who knows about the 'half runner' after growing NT 'Half Runner'? LOL.

I still want to spread some bean towers out in order to grow several varieties. Maybe I'll do that next season. I keep thinking about your lil' brown greasy which you say is a rampant grower. I'm mulling over the idea of a 6' high trellis with 12' of horizontal overhead arbor to grow such a monster and maximize production; 'just to see'.

Well, yea, there are some genuine half runners out there. Some of the heirloom white half runners in this area are easy to contain. Did I send you John Allen Cut-short? It's well behaved at 5-6'.

[philagardener]

Sept 22, 2015 15:00:03 GMT -5 kyredneck said:

That Ohio Pole and Rose Bean appear very similar from where I'm at.

Dredging up this thread as I grew out both Rose and Ohio Pole this year in different parts of the garden. When I started harvesting seed, I couldn't tell the difference between the two. Plants, pods and seed all seem pretty identical to me as well.  Pretty, prolific and vigorous.  Researching that brought me right back here, lol 

[zeedman]

Reed, the beans in the photo look interesting... but they appear to be common beans, not limas. Might have been a mix-up in the seed house. They look like they might make good shellies, though.

Oops, didn't check Page 2... looks like you already solved the mystery.

Years back, I grew the white-seeded King of the Garden, and loved it. When cooked, they became honey colored. Unfortunately, when I moved back home from SoCal, my saved seed died in the process of moving & storage. When I ordered K.o.G. recently from a catalog, it turned out to be green seeded. I found a good substitute though; German Butterbean, an heirloom from SSE. Large white seeds, not as fat as the white-seeded K.o.G., but very good flavor.

[reed]

My friend in N Carolina has a local bean from there that they call rose beans. They look just like Ohio pole except are pinkish color instead of bluish. I'm getting some of them for next year.

I also really like the K.o.G limas. Found out last year they are not happy grown in the corn patch, only got a few seeds. Ohio pole did real well in the corn even deep in inside where there was lots of shade.