I wasn’t able to find a 2025 thread for runner beans, so here’s a place to share reports for your GTS and other runner bean projects.
I just planted a diverse mix of runner beans including the 2025 GTS mix, the British Pop mix from Adaptive Seeds, two varieties from an awesome local seed grower, and some others I had collected over the years. This is my first year growing an intentionally diverse mix fully interplanted, and I’m looking forward to the beautiful chaos.
I split the seeds I have from each of these sources and shared a package with a friend to grow nearby and we’ll end up swapping seeds of the survivors.
It’s about 2-3 weeks early for direct seeding runner beans here in Seattle, but I figured I’d push my luck and exert selection pressure for cool soil germination and vigor. I was inspired to start now because a couple of runner bean tubers I overwintered as an experiment in my garden shed started to grow again a few weeks ago and I needed to plant them out to prevent them from getting root bound.
There’s been a very high demand for runner beans in the Seed Share Program, so we encourage everyone to return some of your saved seed this year.
This year my farm is growing a 100 ft row of runner beans to increase the seed stock for Going to Seed. The seed we’re using is roughly half from the 2025 GTS Mix, with more diversity from a few other sources. We are in particularly cool, damp zone in Corbett, OR, and we tend to wait to plant until the soil is 65-70 degrees F (18-21 deg C), which is mid-May to early June for us.
I’m very excited to include seed that Anna shared from the USDA GRIN collection. These varieties were collected in the 1970s in Mexico and Guatemala, pictured below. Some very interesting traits, little small beans, some larger ones, beautiful colors and shapes, and some with attractive little dimples.
I’m also including some seeds from @KayEverts who is nearby and has her own collection of diverse runner beans. Will take some photos of those soon. And also including just a few of our own collection which is a diverse mix of black and white runners:
Thanks, @suffling . I think paying closer attention to soil temperature is an area where my gardening could stand to improve. I’m always impatient to get things started in the spring and our damp maritime soils are slow to warm. There’s a balance between pushing the envelope and just throwing seeds away, hopefully I still get decent germination this year.
Here’s the final seed stock I’ll be planting for the GTS seed increase. Hopefully some of these traits will be seen in next year’s Seed Share mix. The population is composed of this most recent GTS Seed Share runner mix, selections from @KayEverts, and a few of my farm’s black and white grexes. The following populations were added at some point, some of which are diverse collections themselves:
Going to Seed mix, Sadie’s Horse, British Pop (Adaptive Seeds), Lofthouse Landrace Special, White Emergo, Royal Corona, Spagna Bianco, Moltovanesti Buffalo, Scarlet, Black Coat, 5 different USDA GRIN accessions from Mexico and Guatemala. I suspect that Sunset and Painted Lady were also included at one point, and likely a handful of others.
