2022-08-11T07:00:00Z
A few years ago a friend gave me a small handful of a borlotto type bean. He got them from someone else but had not grown them. He didn’t know how old they were nor whether they were climbers or a bush type. I planted them along a trellis just in case and they turned out to be climbers. The following season I weighed out some of the beans I had harvested and planted them. The yield was 10 times the sow weight. Last season I did it again with the newer seeds and the yield was 40 times the sow weight.
It seems like saving seeds two years in a row has allowed these beans to adapt quite well to conditions here. I’m hoping for another increase this year but as long as I get around the 40x mark I’ll be happy. This is a bean I’d like to cross with a runner bean like Scarlet Emperor which has nice long pods and brilliant red flowers.
2022-08-10T07:00:00Z
One of my favorite green beans is KY Wonder. I’ve grown them and saved seed for thirty years or more, long before I ever thought of selection or plant breeding or anything like that. But when it came to saving seed, I always did favor the cleaner pods. That is pods that had less spotting from molds or bugs. Depending on that year’s weather and bug and disease pressure it wasn’t always possible to save perfectly clean pods but over the years it got easier. I also started saving seed from longer, straighter pods.
I think at first, I wasn’t saving disease or bug resistant seeds, instead I was trying to avoid saving contaminated seeds. Turns out the bugs and diseases are in the environment anyway so without knowing it Iwas saving resistant seeds after all.
My KY Wonder beans still taste wonderful, but I became aware a few years ago they no longer look like what is currently sold as KY Wonders. Pods are longer, wider and straighter. Seeds are larger, flatter and lighter in color. Apparently, given time even an inbreed heirloom can adapt. I added them to my landrace, and have at least twice I’ve seen them cross to something else, but I make an exception to the mix it up rule and make sure to keep my improved KY Wonder beans pure.
I guess it proves what Carol Deppe and Joseph have said, if you save seeds, you’re a plant breeder.
I have had the same experience with some beans and others too. Although there shouldn’t be much improvement with staple variety, and cross definetely has better change of adapting, there are some important caviats to the rule. First seeds are often produced, not maintained. Looks are the most important factor and plants are babied too much. So there will be seeds from plants that should have been culled that dont make to seed with home grower and harder conditions. Then there is possibility of epigenetic changes/mutations. Although that’s not much some will happen eventually. Also could be that those seeds weren’t as stable to start with and there is enough variation for improvement. Again they are mainly produced based on looks and maybe stabling wasn’t done as rigorously or there is cross pollination during prodution. Probably many more things, but I think there limits to it without proper crossing with different variety.
Awesome! I am growing some borlotto bean in the windowsill at the moment - - it’s also a climber, winding it’s way through my wife’s “So I’m not Martha Stewart - - deal with it!” sign at the moment😁. If it yields, the next generation will get planted out next season, along with the batch of seed from which I planted. It’ll very likely be a sister to some grain corn.
It’s wonderful to hear about this kind of success. I have heard and bean inspired by Mark’s KY Wonder breeding before, and am so now again. I was actually just musing this morning that I bet local adaptation is just as important as diverse genetics.
At the same time, I think that borlotto might be something special though. I looked for instructions on how to grow it before I planted it, and I just couldn’t figure it out. Is it a compact bush or a massive one? Is it a bush beanor a pole bean? The information I was reading was inconsistent. For me it also climbs, and one of my beans sent up an extra long stem and unfurled two climbing stems, one from each side of the seed. Only one of the bunch did that.
It seems to me that there are some heirlooms like Nanticoke squash that just break preconceptions about what an heirloom crop is. You’d think it’d have stabilized over all these generations into a more uniform phenotype! Or have Nanticoke stewards continued to bring in fresh genetics over all these generations, as many Mexican corn stewards do with teosinte and many stewards in this group do?
@H.B It turns out that there are numerous cultivars of borlotto types, some bush, some pole and no doubt half runners too.
@UnicornEmily Like most places these days, growing conditions vary quite a bit. Often we have warm, wet summers with temps around 30°C (~mid 80s °F) with about 150 frost free days. The last two however have been cool with temps in the low 20s (around 70°F) and this season we had a frost the day before the summer solstice so it will be a much shorter seson. Because we are at 1000m (3300ft) above sea level if nights are cloudless we get a lot of radiant cooling so even mid summer nights can be on the cool side.
Sounds like our summers are ever-so-slightly different! (Laugh.)
We tend to have 180 frost free days of 90-100 degree temperatures during the day, 60-80 degrees at night, and zero rainfall. If there are numerous cultivars of borlotto types, there are probably some that are well adapted to hot dry summers, though. I’d just need to find someone in a similar climate growing them.
While you’re searching for someone growing borlotto types in a similar climate you could just try as many different cultivars as you can find though a single season is not a fair test. It will be from your own saved seeds that a truer picture will emerge. Mine took three seasons to adapt and Joseph has often said that it’s the third year where you see real gains.
I grow beans cheek by jowl and have never observed a cross. I don’t think a bean landrace is on the cards here. I’ll just grow varieties I like. Plenty of other crops that cross readily to work with.