Born to Run
I have a special place in my heart for runner beans. They were the first vegitable I ever grew. It was about seven years ago. We bought this house with a wildly overgrown veggie garden in the back. That first Summer I paid a friend's teenage son to clear the weeds out for me. There was a big trellis running along one side, about two meters tall and three meters long, chicken wire stretched over a sturdy wooden frame. The dried out remnants of last season's runner beans were still clinging to it. My friend gave me some very basic advice on soil preparation, tucking a few dry runner beans into the soil as we talked.
Then we went on holiday for a week, and I came back to runner beans springing up along the trellis. My garden was growing itself. I hadn't done a thing. Aside from the little bit of help they got in self seeding, it turns out that runner beans are prennial. The old inhabitants seemed to have been growing one on each end as a perennial. The elder runner beans were old, with big, gnarled roots.
In our particular climate, there's nothing like runner beans to make one feel competent in the garden. (Though summer squash make a close second). These things quickly sprinted up the two-meter trellis and spilled over the other side; some found thier way into a nearby apple tree. They made me feel like a natural. And I fell in love with their eye-catching scarlet flowers.
Runner beans used to be grown primarily as ornamentals and they still come in a lot of flashy flower colours. Scarlet is the most common type around here. I got hold of some big, beautiful painted lady runner beans a couple years back, thanks to my involvement with our local community garden. They have these fantastic bi-colour salmon pink and white flowers:
Runner beans are just fine as green beans but in my opinion they are much better as dry beans. This means it's best to grow a nice long row of them, in order to get at least a meal or two's worth of dry beans at the end. After we moved out of the house with the great scarlet runner bean trellis, we were renting somewhere without a lot of space to garden, and we weren't there long enough for me to figure out how to do runner beans. The house we rented after THAT - the one we were in until six short months ago- had plenty of room to garden, but it wasn't until the second and last year there that I got around to working out a good spot for runner beans. But I left it so late in the season that I decided to use store-bought seedlings. I have been carrying around that first garden's dry runner beans since the Fall of 2016 now, and at this point their viability is questionable.
At this point I have four lines of runner beans in my seed stash:
Those 2016 scarlet runner beans. Beans from last Fall's store-bought harvest. Those original painted lady runner beans from the community garden. And a few beans from the one painted lady runner that I grew last year. The funny thing is, they all look very different from one another.
This year I planted three of the painted ladies from last season, and two of the original painted ladies from the community garden. Wow, the difference is amazing. The community garden runners have run right up the trellis already, faster than anything. They call them runners for a reason. Two of the three painted lady beans from last year's plants didn't grow at all, and the third is a weird, stunted little thing.
One of the Community garden beans, 19th of January, a few day after sprouting:
The same painted ladies, 29th of January (just ten days later):
The weird, stunted runner bean from last year's crop (also from 29th January):
So what's going on? Well, I've done some research. Runner beans are open pollenated, and will readily cross pollenate with other plants. This includes cross pollenating across different varieties of runner bean, so you shouldn't plant different varieties near each other (maybe not in the same garden at all) if you are planning on saving and seeds for growing.
Not knowing any better, I did just that last year. I grew a whole row of scarlet runner beans, and one painted lady runner less than a meter away on the same trellis. I have sure learned my lesson on growing more than one type of runner at a time. Add to this my suspicions about the store-bought scarlet runner beans that I am now fairly certain crossed with the painted lady. The beans I harvested from those things were small and differently patterned than my old-school beans from my first garden. I have my suspicions that they were some sort of hybrid meant sabatoge gardener's attempts to save seed and plant them next year (yes, this is a real thing that companies do. They want you to keep buying from them.)
I would love to test my theory next year by trying to grow the seeds from the store-bought runner beans. Will they come out all weird and stunted, too? Was cross pollenation with intentionally unviable seed the reason my second-generation painted ladies did so poorly? Perhaps I'll get to the bottom of this next year. Either way I have found the whole subject fascinating. And I am wildly greatful for even my two beautiful painted lady runner beans this year. Just seeing them out there every day gives me a little pick me up.
Then we went on holiday for a week, and I came back to runner beans springing up along the trellis. My garden was growing itself. I hadn't done a thing. Aside from the little bit of help they got in self seeding, it turns out that runner beans are prennial. The old inhabitants seemed to have been growing one on each end as a perennial. The elder runner beans were old, with big, gnarled roots.
In our particular climate, there's nothing like runner beans to make one feel competent in the garden. (Though summer squash make a close second). These things quickly sprinted up the two-meter trellis and spilled over the other side; some found thier way into a nearby apple tree. They made me feel like a natural. And I fell in love with their eye-catching scarlet flowers.
Runner beans used to be grown primarily as ornamentals and they still come in a lot of flashy flower colours. Scarlet is the most common type around here. I got hold of some big, beautiful painted lady runner beans a couple years back, thanks to my involvement with our local community garden. They have these fantastic bi-colour salmon pink and white flowers:
Runner beans are just fine as green beans but in my opinion they are much better as dry beans. This means it's best to grow a nice long row of them, in order to get at least a meal or two's worth of dry beans at the end. After we moved out of the house with the great scarlet runner bean trellis, we were renting somewhere without a lot of space to garden, and we weren't there long enough for me to figure out how to do runner beans. The house we rented after THAT - the one we were in until six short months ago- had plenty of room to garden, but it wasn't until the second and last year there that I got around to working out a good spot for runner beans. But I left it so late in the season that I decided to use store-bought seedlings. I have been carrying around that first garden's dry runner beans since the Fall of 2016 now, and at this point their viability is questionable.
At this point I have four lines of runner beans in my seed stash:
Those 2016 scarlet runner beans. Beans from last Fall's store-bought harvest. Those original painted lady runner beans from the community garden. And a few beans from the one painted lady runner that I grew last year. The funny thing is, they all look very different from one another.
This year I planted three of the painted ladies from last season, and two of the original painted ladies from the community garden. Wow, the difference is amazing. The community garden runners have run right up the trellis already, faster than anything. They call them runners for a reason. Two of the three painted lady beans from last year's plants didn't grow at all, and the third is a weird, stunted little thing.
One of the Community garden beans, 19th of January, a few day after sprouting:
The same painted ladies, 29th of January (just ten days later):
The weird, stunted runner bean from last year's crop (also from 29th January):
So what's going on? Well, I've done some research. Runner beans are open pollenated, and will readily cross pollenate with other plants. This includes cross pollenating across different varieties of runner bean, so you shouldn't plant different varieties near each other (maybe not in the same garden at all) if you are planning on saving and seeds for growing.
Not knowing any better, I did just that last year. I grew a whole row of scarlet runner beans, and one painted lady runner less than a meter away on the same trellis. I have sure learned my lesson on growing more than one type of runner at a time. Add to this my suspicions about the store-bought scarlet runner beans that I am now fairly certain crossed with the painted lady. The beans I harvested from those things were small and differently patterned than my old-school beans from my first garden. I have my suspicions that they were some sort of hybrid meant sabatoge gardener's attempts to save seed and plant them next year (yes, this is a real thing that companies do. They want you to keep buying from them.)
I would love to test my theory next year by trying to grow the seeds from the store-bought runner beans. Will they come out all weird and stunted, too? Was cross pollenation with intentionally unviable seed the reason my second-generation painted ladies did so poorly? Perhaps I'll get to the bottom of this next year. Either way I have found the whole subject fascinating. And I am wildly greatful for even my two beautiful painted lady runner beans this year. Just seeing them out there every day gives me a little pick me up.
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