Beans Common and Tepary
2022-11-11T08:00:00Z
I grew out my bean collection in 2022. I wasn’t perfectly satisfied and still have never detected a cross. Overall though it served my purpose of refreshing my bean collection. My tepary bean population is mainly Lofthouse with some Blue Speckled from Native Seed Search added. The blue speckled was grown with Paiute last time about 2016 and crossing could have occurred but who knows? The common bean mix was grown very badly and probably returned slightly less seed than I started with. I consider that to be a win in that some badly adapted strains may have been eliminated. It is dominated by Emy Lou’s Golden which is from the local Triple Divide Seed Coop but also contains seed trade beans including Lofthouse and Carol Deppe’s Beefy Resilient Grex. I grew all the Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan beans I could get a hold of over the years but I don’t think they actually like it here- Emy Lou’s Golden has outcompeted them. I do recognize a few individual varieties of common bean from seed trades and so forth mixed in there. I also see the occasional bean I recognize from Lofthouse or the occasional one that could be from Deppe. Beans are not very high on my radar- I may not grow this many of them again for five years. I made a decision a few years ago to focus on tomatoes. I think I will keep doing that until I have accomplished something significant in that regard. So beans are a little on the back burner. Still, I think it was a good grow out year! Hopefully someday that Emy Lou’s Golden will cross with one of these other beans and start the process of really adapting a bean to here. Maybe that cross is already here waiting for me to grow these out again. Or some young person with a specific interest in beans will start bean breeding here!
julie d
I love looking at dried beans!
They look quite uniform in size, is that the case? If so have you been selecting that way?
I like growing beans. I expanded my seed collection last year and fingers crossed should have a few reliable mixes in a few seasons. Even if they don’t cross, I hope there is enough variety in the mix.
William S
The common beans are not uniform in size. Some of the varieties in the mix are distinctly different sizes and shapes. Though it’s possible that it is mostly the same size but if so I didn’t select for that. I do believe that there has been selection though. It was just environmental selection though. I made a dense four foot wide planting block of my aging bean collection, neglected to weed it much, and this is what survived my poor treatment. It may be that small beans have the competitive advantage here and with dense plantings.
The tepary beans seem to be uniform in size but if so they came to me that way.
Ryder Timberlake
Very nice! I love beans but have never grown common until this year. We’ve grown mung and some red runner every year for the past three years, Cherokee black the past two years and black chickpeas two years ago. I tried cranberry and great northern as experimental late food/winter-killed cover crops and only the great northern beans have made it through the first frosts. The cranberry beans sure grew fast up until then though. Looking forward to adding variety next year!
William Sc
Great Northern beans are commonly available in grocery stores here and unless the variety used has actually changed supposedly have a history that goes back to the three tribes of the upper Missouri. An interesting common bean to try anyway. The Emy Lou’s golden bean is a great find by the Triple Divide Seed Coop for our area. It seems to outcompete other beans in my mix.
Scarlet Runner Beans
I got Josephs Scarlett runner beans and have been planting a few each year for years. Usually somewhere in my son’s garden. For the first couple years all that came back to me for seed was a black seeded bean. The third year last year I got a white seeded one. This year I planted a whole fence side and added in some ordinary scarlet runner beans and a packet of British Pop. Well I think the British pop got a bad section of the fence maybe with too competitive neighbors. What I got back was lots of black bean, one single white bean, and lots of ordinary red and black bean. Enough to cover a paper plate. I just put it away for the winter and didn’t take a photo. I think the black and white ones show consistently better odds of setting seed for me. So some local adaptation is occurring but I would like more diversity to survive too.
Read less
I suspect I’m not going to get much in the way of seed increase from my beans this year, although I would love to be proven wrong. My main goal this year is simply to get back seeds, so I can start the process of locally adapting them, so I can grow enough to eat some in future years.
Of course, if I get abundant beans and can save tons, share tons, and eat tons, that would be awesome. 
I love to see dry beans, too ! they talk abundance of good food to me.
This year was difficult in france too, for beans, drought and unusually high temperatures. In my mix, obviously those coming from Cuba (bush) did better than the others and since I did not actually MIX them because I discovered Landracing only during summer, well, I have very little crosses .
But one is sure: on one plant I found four colors of beans ! I treasure them.
All that are growing beans, please tell me how many different varieties did you gather so I get a flavour of how many more than my 20 or so I should gather. thanks
I’m going to grow the dry bean grex (EFN) this year. I haven’t grown dry beans before so we’ll see how it goes. I’m also growing bush green beans but will be separated as much as I can.
What I use most is pinto, great northern, navy, and (less so) black beans. I’ve thought about just getting bags of them from the store and growing them. We’ll see how it goes this year.
This season the common dry beans we are growing are Coco blanc nain (a lovely white bean), Jack Rabbit (a red-brown kidney bean), a kidney from store bought beans that we’ve been growing for a few years, Mrociumere (a beautiful speckled bean) and Tiger Eye (orangey tan with red striping). We’ll roll Jack Rabbit into the kidney pool. It doesn’t seem to matter how close we plant them we don’t seem to get crosses, at least none I’ve noticed.
Bean crosses are sneaky. You won’t usually see them in the season they happened but in the next season they will segregate and the season after that they segregate a lot. If you grow for dry beans instead of eating them as snaps and if you have plenty of bumblebees, you will eventually find crosses.
I’m doing a project next year to make them easier to find. Instead of just planting all together as usual, I’ve built fifty individual trellises and am sorting my landrace beans to grow five or six plants on each trellis. That way any off-type beans will be easy to see at harvest.
I have a few beans that I keep in a purer heirloom state so are always grow by themselves. Most of my for sure crosses in the past have come from them.
I usually find one or two plants that seem to have all the crosses. I wonder if these are varieties or individuals that are more susceptible to crossing? Or maybe the blossoms mature later so they aren’t self pollinated before they open? Maybe certain varieties are more open with their pollen as well, and more likely to outcross.
I find myself wanting to test this.
I do believe but I don’t know for sure that some beans are more susceptible to crossing and that this susceptibility is a heritable trait. This leads, in future generations to more and more crossing.
What “I think” happens in an initial cross is that one or more beans in a pod is crossed but that cross is not apparent, that bean or beans still look the same as the others in the pod. This may be two or three beans out of a hundred, maybe more. Many beans sometimes show a color reversal in the seed coat where the pattern is reversed. From what I see it is sometimes the whole bean and sometimes just one side, but this is not a cross.
I have on rare occasions seen a single anomalous bean in a pod for which I have no good explanation. It may be something similar to the xenia effect in corn, in which case it is a cross Xenia Effect in Maize or it may be a case of transposons, in which case it isn’t a cross Transposons
I don’t have a full understanding of how either of those things really work and my grow outs are too small to gain any real understanding of it through observation.
So back to those two or three out of a hundred beans. If one of those beans is planted (by chance) along with other identical looking beans rather than having been eaten it will “probably” yield beans that look different from the others. All of the beans on the vine from that seed will be an off-type compared to the beans from the other vines and all of the beans from that one vine will be the same.
Now I might have hundreds of these off-type beans from that one vine. When I’ve taken fifty of these beans and plant them. I’ve seen as many as six very distinct new kinds, and I think maybe several more with more subtle distinctions. Again, all of the beans from any single vine look the same. At this point fifty beans from any one of these vines might segregate some more the next season. “I think” to make a new stable variety you just keep planting your favorite segregations and the amount of new segregation decreases each generation. Assuming you plant just one kind each year and that no random new crossing takes place.
I’ve never taken it that far, once I have confirmed the cross by seeing the initial segregations, I’ve just added them to my landrace where they get lost in the crowd. Any poor performers select themselves out and good ones become established.
Last year I planted rattlesnake, blue lake, and inca pea pole beans to see if any would thrive in our short season valley in northern Idaho. The three types were grown in the same area and treated the same. The blue lake produced two green pods and didn’t mature before frost. Nothing from rattlesnake except stunted growth. The rattlesnake was from my own seed that thrived in our old garden in Denver. The Inca Pea was outstanding. Lots of growth, early pod production, and dry beans by frost. The green beans were tender and even the older green pods with a maturing bean inside were good. The seed was creamy like a butter bean.
I got the seeds from Strictly Medicinal seeds and are listed at 70 days to maturity. The description from the web site: “(yin/yang bean) Pole bean, a South American heirloom that grows very well in temperate gardens. A vigorous climber that gets off to a fast start and finishes very early.”
I highly recommend Inca Pea if you live in a cool, short season area. It was expensive to buy the seed at $2.95 for 10 beans but in this case it was worth it. I’ve been looking for a bean that will provide a good dry bean for soups and refrieds and this is the first I’ve identified that will work.
For my pole-bean grex, I obtained 78 constituent beans, three of which were already mixes, grexes, hybrid swarms, or landraces:
Rio Zape, Eye of the Goat, Tarbais, Marvel of Venice, Blauhilde, Purple Podded pole, Bogen, Bosnian Pole, Breganzer, Brejo, Corn Planter’s Purple, Cresnjevec, Deb’s Creek, Emelia’s Italian, Eye of the goat, Fagiolo Viola Di Assiago, Forelle Fliederfarben, Ga Ga Hut, Gila River, Graines de Cafe, Hashuli Brown and White, Hemelvaartboontje, Hiawatha, Illinois Wild Goose, Jembo Polish, Kifl Mucko, Lambada, Lynnfield, Mariazeller, Manachelle Di Trevio, Mona Lisa, Osborne and Clyde, Poletschka, Selugia, Seneca Cornstalk, Splash Trout, Succotash, Tamila, Volga German Siberian, Witzenhausen, Yellow/Orange, Pink Tip Cornfield, Red seeded cornfield, Purple Podded pole, Mayflower, Ideal Market, Connecticut Wonder, Climbing French, Iroquois, Rice River, Raven, Blue Shackamaxon, Neckargold, Hidatsa Shield, Monte Gusto, Turkey Craw, Good Mother Stallard, Cherokee Trail of Tears, Crawford, Louisiana, Whipple Organic, Lazy Wife Greasy, Tiger Eye, Margaret Best Greasy Cut Short, Bertie’s Best, Carolina Red Stick, Fatman, Jeminez, Roark, Dry (from Lofthouse), Mariazeller Landrace, Sacre Bleu, Brighstone, Pole Bean Party Mix, Pole Bean Landrace (mostly dry), Hannah Freeman, dry semi-runner, Ippoliti Family Heriloom.
For my bush-beans, I started with beans from Joseph one year and then added a few others as I saw things that seemed especially desirable:
Lofthouse Landrace, Flor de Mayo, Koronis Purple, Rosso Di Lucca, Midnight black beans , Mogette De Vendee, Bumblebee, Bush Dry Landrace, Cranberry, Beefy-Bush Black Resilient (Deppe), dry bush beans, Lina Sisco Bird Egg Bean
Four colors of beans on one plant, and they’re all so pretty! You are absolutely right to treasure them. 
My favorite of those four is the black one with little white specks. It reminds me of the night sky.
4 Colors out of one plant! That’s really cool I see why you treasure it! I loved growing beans in the past. I just find them so beautiful! And So versatile in the kitchen! I love the excitement of threshing them and seeing all the different colors and patterns! Carol Deppe talks about how much she likes looking at them in the winter like some people look at flowers or jewels. I relate! but a few years ago bean beetles became a true problem in my garden and I just could not get a crop anymore. I’ve been playing with planting way later to break the cycle of those bugs and that worked somehow except only a very few varieties were early enough to work with. I’m really excited to start land racing this crop next season to eventually get many varieties that can resist those bugs better and give me a good crop.