Last year I grew out a big row of hyper-diverse broadbeans, and harvested the seeds. Not everything ended up in the harvest tarp - some seed was shed onto the woodchip mulch.
Later, I raked the woodchips into the path so I could re-spread it on the followup crop (garlic) once it had emerged.
But the fallen seed sprouted in the path, no big issue, I let it go, thinking "these are good survivors, and probably inputing life into the soil. I used other woodchips and let these broadbeans grow on.
This week i harvested the garlic, and cut some of the broadbeans whose pods had started to dry down, throwing them back onto the bed to dry. Tonight, i went to pick up the pods before tomorrowâs rain.
Several ideas formed as I was harvesting:
My initial thought was to throw these back into the wider genepool (thereâs another big row yet to harvest), but i noticed that some of the pods has dehisced (dropped their seed). and a bit of an ad hoc survey of the harvest indicated that many of the pods were thin, and easily split. This it makes sense: the varieties that easily shed their seed would of course be the volunteers in this sub population. Not a great trait if you want to harvest dry seed as a pulse, so my second thought was to reject this seed.
Luckily, it took me a bit of thinking time to harvest the pods, and i mused on how this year, we harvested very young green pods, about little finger size (US=pinky size) and cooked them whole in a napoli sauce. Yum!
they were nearly all toothsome, with only occasional pods having tough strings.
Now, I recalled a trait from my snowpea breeding days, that dry pods that were easily crushable were also low fibre snow peas. - a great way to select for snowpea pods using dry mature pods from a mixed population.
Perhaps the same trait is reflected in broadbeans?
A bit of pod grinding revealed that this sub-population had a lot of the âcrushable podâ trait, indicating low fibre development compared to the boiler plate toughness of some of the pods i harvested from the wider population last year.
Perhaps there is a culinarily useful âbaby fabaâ project to work on?
My take home is landrace selection isnât just about survivorship - we need to be careful we arenât selecting for an unwanted characteristic without knowing about it.
Second, often there may be a silver lining in our failures - one growerâs rejects may be anotherâs grail.
Pay close attention. Donât hurry. enjoy the diversity.
g
Thanks for posting this! Iâm always interested in stories of inadvertent selection, since it is always operating âbehind the scenesâ. By becoming more aware of the possible results of such selection, we can greatly improve our plant-breeding ability.
Very interesting Gregg. In the UK there are broad beans selected for eating pod and all. I remember seeing them on the seed racks when I lived there. They were sometimes referred to as snow beans, but mostly they used the British term mangetout. Despite this last being a French âwordâ I never heard it used in France when I lived there.
As an aside, the bush bean Dragon Tongue has so little fibre in the pod that when it dries down the pod just crumbles away when you crush it. That makes it great as a home grown snap bean but useless for market because it goes quite limp once picked.
I didnât know of such a broadbean! there i go, re-inventing the wheel again.
We have really enjoyed them here this year as tiny pods. slightly weird mouthfeel, but Iâm working on that too, trying to rediscover a âshiny podâ trait i observed some years ago.
g
Iâll break this somewhat long discussion int a few different posts.
My initial breeding program.
Several years ago I started a broadbean grex - using all the available varieties I could find - the two standard lines Aquadulce, and Coles Dwarf, and a few rarer lines like Cambridge Scarlet, Red Flowered, and Chocolate Flowered, and after searching the smaller eed companies, a few new-to-me ones - Egyptian, Libyan, and a couple of dwarf commercial cultivars collected from broad acre fields - Australia is the highest exporter of favas in the world. A seed collecting friend Jac Semmler donated Senoritas Hat and StoneEar both with distinct markings on the seedcoat.
After a couple of years of neglectful planting and seed collecting, I found the Australian Grains Genebank collection, and ordered 50 of their âinterestingâ accessions (they have around 3000 lines). I went for broad geographic spread around the world, anything with âlandraceâ or âtraditionalâ in the descriptors, and a few elite drought or disease resistant lines, mostly from ICARDA (About Us | ICARDA) in Allepo in Syria. (I wonder how their work and collections fared in the conflicts?)
After a few years of growing out - minimal soil prep, low amendments, no weeding, no irrigation - I had a pretty diverse collection with lots of phenotypes showing up in the seed, but with a tendency to smaller seeds, and dusky seed coats with the occasional darker blob.
I tried a community outreach to get collaborators - after distributing about 50 packets of seed in 2022, I got back seed from 4 participants which went into the general mix.
Clearly I need to work on my community building and outreach.
Multiple uses for broadbeans, and potential breeding targets
Broadbeans have multiple uses, and as i grew them out several of these became targets of selection.
They make a great green manure and biomass, fix nitrogen, and here in southern Australia at least grow through winter when beds are otherwise vacant. Therre doesnât seem to be much difference between the individuals apart from vigour, which i was selecting for anyway through close planting.
They can be used as food throughout the growing cycle
green tips eaten raw or as cooked greens,
the flowers can be harvested as edible garnishes and while labour intensive, clamshells of flowers fetch a good price. extending the colour range from the normal white with black spots is a desirable target for breeding, and one famer was most excited when i introduced him to red and chocolate flowered varieties.
young pods can be cooked and eaten whole. In my harvesting of these I noted some pods were virtually stringless - I didnât tag the plants they came from, so this will be a target of the current crop.
as the pods develop, the pods are usually harvested when fully developed for the green beans within. Lots of big pods full of big beans with a thin seedcoat would be the best selection for this end use.
When the pods mature, darken and the seed dries down, overall productivity for seed mass, and ability to hold the dry pods on the plant would be the best target.
so there are lots of potential projects within the existing gene pool.
Issues with V.faba cultivation/breeding.
While mostly a trouble-free crop, broadbeans can suffer from a number of problems - various fungal diseases of the foliage, lodging (when the culms get overloaded and fall over), and seed shatter, when the pods shed the dry seed before collection. Selecting away from these traits is relatively straightforward.
However, one characteristic remains problematic for a section of the human population - favism. This is a human genetic trait reported most often from countries with endemic malaria, and derives from an inability to metabolise vicine and covicine (v-c) produced in Vicia faba with serious health concerns (including death) for sufferers. While a low v-c accession was identifed from Poland, (and two subsequent low v-c varieties have been produced through mutation and irradiation experiments), no phenotypic marker for the low v-c gene exists, although clear hilum may be a candidate marker - the literature suggests low c-v can occur in the presence of a dark hilum, but is not explicit whether a clear hilum is sufficient to indicate low c-v.
A further anti-nutrient component of fava is tannins; two recessive genes code for zero tannins, and fortunately the pure white flower phenotype is a marker for at least one of these low tannin recessive genes (zt1).
In 2023 I selected out âgreen seed coatâ as a trait for colured flowers - I had noticed that âRed-Floweredâ had a distictly green seed, so decided to test the proposition by selecting from the mass crossed seed from 2022 anything with a green seed to grow as a semi-isolated block - about half the plants showed some divergence from the âwhite with black spotsâ phenotype, so anything that was âwwbsâ was culled, and the remaining plants allowed to cross - or not.
This season Iâve selected out 4 traits to develop into grexes
coloured flower, incorporating pinks, lavenders, brown, red and three new accessions from AGGB labelled as âlow tanninâ which I hope will have pure white flowers. These may not add any pure colours to the grex, since the zt1 gene probably supresses anthocyanin production, and will probably suppress the flower colours on the way. Unfortunately the yellow flowered form seems to be unavailable in Australia, and V.faba is on the âalmost impossible to importâ list.
a âfingerprintâ seed coat mix.
-a yellow seedcoat mix
a âvery large bean and podâ mix at the request of a collaborator.
additionally, Iâm growing a mix of all the AGGB accessions together in a super-neglect bed to see what happens, and I might grow out the three âlow tanninâ accessions in isolated beds for return to the AGGB.
Very interesting to follow your project Gregg. Is it the same population as you describe in this thread? If so, they might be merged, so we can follow the progression together. I like your observations about stringiness at the mature seed stage (if you can easily break the pod = less fibres). If you want your summaries to be on the top of the thread, you could copy/paste it there in the original thread.
Great project @gregg_muller. Like you, we find them excellent for the winter garden. This year we added extra seeds with each broad bean planted. In one area just oats and in another oats, flax and coriander, all into the same hole.
I love the green seeded ones and didnât realise theyâre associated with coloured flowers. Iâll pay more attention next time.
Big fan of fava here in the US SWâNorthern New Mexico is one of the places itâs still widely grown at a small scale for home consumption that Iâve seen here. Itâs a far less scientific project than yours, but Iâve been collecting seed from farmers and folks in my area in an attempt to grow better low water adapted fava. Would be happy to swap genetics at some point! Had a single plant accession from one of the pueblos come up with colored flowers (pink/magenta) this year; hadnât encountered that before!
I rode by a field planted with favas yesterday and thought Iâd try to figure out what the farmers grow here in Finland.
Turns out that⌠the most popular commercial variety in Finland, Kontu, was derived from the cross ICARDA 536 Ă Ukko, a Finnish landrace from Karelia. It was among the earliest cultivars in the world and had been about 80-90% of what Finnish farmers grew, but I think thereâs several new cultivars now that are a bit earlier or have improved drought tolerance or lower v-c.
I thought that was a neat coincidence as I had just learned about ICARDA from @gregg_muller âs post. (Can I ask how you accessed the ICARDA seed?)
Also seems the earliest varieties that Finnish breeders are interested in are coming from Syria and Cyprus, which seemed counterintuitive at first. But is encouraging for things like the serendipity seed swapsâmixing the regional and global.
Photos to show the rather tight crop spacing. I think max height is .75m (currently maybe .2â.3m)
Thanks @gregg_muller for sharing all this. The information about phenotype markers for low tannin is really helpful. Iâve been trying to figure out what flower types signify in terms of bean characteristics, and sort of suspected white flowers were lower tanin, but great to confirm. Any other correlations youâve noticed between dried bean or flower color and crop characteristics?
Off to search for a yellow flowered fava. Iâve never seen that!
The Australian Grains Gene Bank database for Vicia faba is a bit untidy and includes a lot of what looks like legacy information, probably a function of a varied history of acquisitions and data compilation. However the downloadable spreadsheet can be searched (I just use âControl fâ ). Many of the accessions have been shared between international seed banks, and much of the material comes from ICARDA listings. So I just requested the ones I was interested in.
This international sharing is useful when reading the scientific literature, since the authors usually list the accession numbers of the material they use. While these donât correspond to the Australian labels, the Australian database does list the original names and tags of their accessions, and who donated it. For example, with a bit of detective work I even managed to hunt down a report of a seed collection expedition to Yunnan where they report in detail on the individual villages and varieties that they grew, which cross-referenced back to accessions in the seed bank! Awesome! but many of the accessions have empty fields or âunknownâ for many of the data points.
Unfortunately the yellow flowered accession listed in a couple of the research papers refer to accessions from a town in Sweden that seems to have had a research institute there, but all i can find is a modern private company there now, with no way to access their database, and no correspondence with the Australian data. Itâs probably in the Australian collection somewhere, but I donât have any way of finding it amongst the 2000+ listings, since flower colour isnt one of the fields
