Here’s my seed harvest. I’m absolutely fascinated with the black and purple ones and glad they did so well. I only ate fresh of the grocery store favas I planted earlier.
Here’s some interesting purple hybrid patterns:
I am wondering why the home seed saving results in a green more often than a brown seed.
I don’t think my plants got enough pollination because they set a lot of flowers and didn’t make near as much fruit. I planted them in a block and it seemed like the ones on the outside edge facing the sun got the most pollination. So next time I think I might plant them either in a total polyculture so they get more spacing, or just a row, that way the bugs can move from one to the next but hopefully they don’t miss any.
Most of them are dead, but a few are resprouting in the heat and setting a couple flowers again. I’m really surprised, although I have seen them resprout before.
The light green/tan seeds will often darken to a reddish brown or darker brown color as they age, especially if exposed to light. You’re likely observing that your seeds are fresher than the ones you planted.
Oooh I love all the variation! I recently harvested mine as well but I feel like they all seem like either straight green or purple, though I think I recall some black in there… Currently letting them dry a bit longer after shelling but I haven’t given em a thorough look yet since I shelled them with my soup peas at the same time haha. Will share pictures when I check on em in a week or so!
Favas set a lot of flowers, but they also abort most of them. In my experience, they can be full of flowers, but only the smaller-beaned ones make 20+ pods consistently. Larger ones can make half of that on a hot summer and approach similar numbers on a cool summer like this.
Also, like Avery said, the colour does change quite a bit! Less so on the purples (although they do get darker), but the browns pick up a lot of colour in storage. Last year my plants died early in the July heat and the white beans and the brown beans looked almost identical when I finally harvested a month later. By spring, the colour difference was stark.
Fingerprint mix: contains some seed from all plants that exhibited even partial fingerprint pattern genetics, and all seeds from the plants with full fingerprint pattern. I’ll probably plant a separate bed with these seeds.
Partial fingerprint: remainder of seed from plants with partial fingerprint genetics. This will be saved as back-up seed.
Productive purples: a few seeds each from the highest yielding plants with large purple seeds. Even my most productive purple seeded plants were comparatively low-yielding (70-90g dry seed per plant).
Purple crosses: a few seeds each from plants with intermediate purple seeds that may be from previous crosses.
Largest seeds: these are all of the seeds from the single plant with largest seeds. It generally had 3-4 seeds per pod. Intermediate yield (104g dry seed)
5-6 seeds per pod: all of the seeds from the single plant that produced pods with 6 large seeds. Intermediate yield (101g dry seed)
Highest yield: 6-10 seeds from each of the 6 highest yielding plants (more from the best), plus a few seeds from similar plants that had 4-5 large seeds per pod but yield could not be fully assessed because the plants were pruned. Best yielding plants produced 150-170g dry seed per plant.
Oddballs: A few seeds saved from unique or otherwise interesting plants but where yield or seed size was not impressive. I’ll plant out some of these for the sake of diversity and to keep evaluating them.
Fava Ark ‘26 (not pictured): Two seeds from each individual plant, minus a few of the fingerprints that produced very limited numbers of seed. This is a back-up to preserve diversity that can be added back in future years.
I also separated out a full quart of dry seed to return for the GTS seed share. By volume it was approximately 60% from the highest yield group and 40% mixture of everything else except the fingerprints because numbers were limited. Everything is in the freezer now to kill any potential weevils, though I saw no evidence of weevils during processing.
My favas got eaten like that last year! Twas voles, im sure other rodents would do the same. Kinda clever the way they open them up looks so funny, thats same they did to mine. Once the green pods had large beans and they were really getting eaten I ended up harvesting the whole plants and letting them dry on the stalks, they matured quality seed.
What a joy to see everyone’s harvests here’s a photo journey of our plot, we weeded it twice and watered it mostly at establishment for a couple weeks and then let the grow …
It was fun to see some of my purple favas I’ve been selecting for large size were as big and bigger than some of the aprovecho select i mixed in… I noticed new disease i have not seen after 6 years of growing two crops of favas a year, some burrowing into the seeds and little bumps on the seed pod where the seed has spots or burrows… idk if I got pictures… has anyone seen this?! It does make me wonder how we handle seed disease spread with the going to seed share, I just won’t be saving from those plants hopefully they didn’t contaminate the rest as it’s a beautiful seed crop, Im excited about the green seeded ones and there is was one crimson flower plant!
I selected out all of the pods with 5 or more large seeds per pod and pods that made two pods with atleast 4 seeds on one node! These were all my purples which make sense as I’ve been selecting for that each year, so fun to watch them get longer I had atleast one plant that had 6 large beans per pod!!
I harvested all tbe plants that only had one pod per stalk or hard lodged entirely to the ground cause eating favas is a good excuse to do some selection, all of those plants shared there genetics but atleast won’t be the mother plant, I’ll send the mixed seed shown below to gts, and continue going with my purple favas, my goal with them is slowly introducing different genetics and adaptions for example i had a population that received no water and now a population that has mixed with gts and aprevecho, and this is my first winter having enough seed I’ll do a large overwintering plot of the purples too, it’s really fun to see a plant through so many different season and experiences, always willing to grow me larger and larger beans and pods like a true champ, Im so in love with what we all get to play and be in relationship with seeds are the best and favas will always faves
Oh also I planted denser than I usually do but found they held themselves up together more and luckily mildew wasn’t an issue with the season and a windy plot
And on a related topic, Going to Seed is collecting short videos from different people to combine into a single community video- @Taja and @avery.bowron I’d love to see your answers to the questions in videos (or there are photo options) if you’re willing! Adaptation Gardening Stories
Amazing harvest Julia! Purple is definitely dominant it has beeen a very easy trait to select for.. when i was only selecting for purple i would get less than 5% green every season and that happened right away.
Love the way yall are collecting info, videos and engaging media are so important these days, I’ll definitely fill something out thanks for encouragement.
Okay interesting, thank you so much!! now that you’ve said that i remember hearing that, about favas and grains too.. I’ll do (freezing 3 weeks) for mine before i send them in !
I think 48 hours would be enough, based on some things I’ve read. It is also important that they freeze very quickly and at a very cold temp. (-18c or -21c). So it is better to freeze in smaller quantities.
