Bean Seeds and Seeding Beans

I waited a week later to plant my beans.  We had a patch of cool weather and I wanted to be sure of good warm soil temperatures for proper germination.

My bean seed is a personal selection of the old standby: Blue Lake Pole.  They were the go-to bean of choice (industry standard?) 30 years ago with great flavour, vigorous growth, good pollination and fine quality green beans for freezing.  Blue Lake had such a good reputation that some lower growing bush varieties were calling themselves Bush Blue Lake even though they were still much blander tasting as many bush beans tend to be.  But Blue Lake had one problem for the Seed Sellers: they were open pollinated and anyone could save their own seed.

Ten years ago I ran into a few backyard growers that complained of the stringiness of their store bought Blue Lake seed.  ‘String’ beans of the olden days were where you had to hand break the bean’s stem tip end and strip the ‘string’ down the length of the bean before processing.  (I’ve had to do that with some snap peas recently).  Blue Lakes had never been stringy before.  

It would seem the producer was harvesting his seed without any selecting for only positive traits.  Some unwanted (pollen) characteristics had been let in, or perhaps the seed was so cheap that they wanted to just keep costs down and purity of seed wasn’t a priority.  I solved these backyard growers’ problem by gifting them with some of my Personally Selected and Saved Blue Lake seed.

Saving bean seed is moderately simple.  Once the beans have established themselves, I pole them and save one pole of 4 to 6 plants for seed saving.  I don’t pick any beans from that pole the whole season.  Then I select only those beans that are long and straight, let them dry on the pole and store for another year’s planting seed.  I must only plant the one variety so no other beans will cross pollinate them. 

However, saving seed is like wine – not every year is a good vintage.  Some years my saved bean seed has had poor germination. 

2015 was a very good year. 

2016 -- I don’t remember. 

2017 was very poor quality seed – or so I found out later. 

2018 was my gardening sabbath rest and I grew nothing but fall rye and red clover. 

2019 -- I seeded my newest (2017) Blue Lake seed and only 64% came up so I reseeded the empty spots.  Twice.  That gave me a more extended ripening crop with plants at three different stages.  Plus, that was the first year the (chinese) Brown Marmorated Stink Bug showed up.  They really enjoyed my longer producing tender crop.  With the resulting bug damage, I kept no seed from 2019.

2020 -- I still had my old 2015 seed and it germinated amazingly well.  We got a good crop and that year and had very few Brown Stink Bugs.  I saved a pole of beans for seed.

2021 -- I really need to wean myself off my old 2015 seed but don’t want to risk a crop failure.  So I planted 60% with my new 2020 seed and 40% with 2015 seed, and I waited for the soil to really warm up.  This year’s bean bed is a bit larger than needed so I should be able to handle some germination losses.  And I believe it’s always preferable to have too many green beans in the freezer than too few.

The bean bed was fortified in my preferred way.  Beans are listed as soil builders and they are, but they still do better with a bit of nitrogen.  I added 4 gallons of one year old composted chicken manure, 1.75 lbs of Rock Phosphate and 1.5 lbs of Lime.  This was nicely tilled in then raked flat with the back of my bow rake. 

 

With my row marker set at 7 inch intervals I drew lines down the length of the bed and across the bed for 7 inch square centres.  I hand pressed one bean seed onto each line intersection with the seed sitting upright on its end about .75 to 1 inch deep.

Now we water and wait.   We’ll see how these new (2020) Bean Seeds are for Seeding Beans.  I’ll keep saving the old 2015 seed until I know that the new crop isn’t stringy or have other defects.

Happy Gardening.