legumes

Burra Maluca wrote:

Brian White wrote:The situation is bleak ... because nitrates are the biggest  problem

If enough of us switch our diets so that we all eat more beans, it might be possible to prevent the cost of food going up 10x.

Hi Burra,  not sure if this is the forum to ask, but do you grow your own beans, peas or lentils? Legumes form the backbone of our diet and I was wondering if there are any tips you can give for growing them in our part of the world. I think we share similar weather conditions- cold winters with some rain, hot, dry summers with ferociuos winds all year round. My husband loves fresh peas and I like fresh beans, but I just can't get them to grow so I'm cautious about allocating any of my meagre gardening space to grow store legumes. A local farmer gave me some fresh chickpeas a few yers back, so they do grow here but not sure if  they need to be innoculated like some legumes. What about lentils?

When I first moved to Portugal over twenty years ago, the place had been abandoned for decades, just ploughed up every year to keep it 'clean'. We couldn't grow any legumes at all! I can't remember where we got it or what it was called, but we got some sort of root inoculant and soaked fava (broad bean) seed in it and grew a little patch of them just fine. The next year we dug up some of the soil from that patch, mixed it with water and soaked a bigger batch of bean seed in it and planted some in the original patch and the rest in 'new' patches. They all grew fine. And over the next few years all kinds of peas and beans started to be able to grow.

The ones that didn't do well were the 'runner bean' types, Phaseolus coccineus. As far as I can tell they won't pollinate during very hot weather (something to do with pollen tubes not growing?) so although the plant grows you don't get any beans off them. I did attempt a breeding project with them once, including the Portuguese feijoca which is the same species but grown as perennial for the dry bean. I never really got anywhere with it though as life happened, as it is wont to do. Other green beans that were Phaseolus vulgaris rather than Phaseolus coccinius managed perfectly well.

We're at a different place now, with better soil, and which hadn't been abandoned for so long. The beans just grow here fine, no problem at all.

The bean that most of the locals grow as a storage crop is feijão frade, which you might know as the black-eyed pea. They seem particularly good at coping with heat, drought, neglect and poor soil.

I'd recommend finding someone near to you who grows beans successfully and begging a shovel-full of soil from their bean-patch to mix into a slurry to inoculate your seed, just in case your soil doesn't have enough of the right bugs.

I can't grow Phaseolus coccineus either!  It turns out that wind and hot weather dry out the pollen - so no beans can develop  [aka scarlet runner beans?]   Bush beans grow perfectly well, so there must be something to it, 🤔  since the bush beans are more sheltered between other plants.
Drying out of pollen also affects the tomato plants. . .

Burra Maluca wrote:I'd recommend finding someone near to you who grows beans successfully and begging a shovel-full of soil from their bean-patch to mix into a slurry to inoculate your seed, just in case your soil doesn't have enough of the right bugs.

Thanks for that advice. I do have a vacuum sealed bag of "innoculent" that I got along with some akfalfa/lucerne seedsI bought several years ago. I decided not to plant the alfalfa and waste the innoculent as I quickly learned the hard way how everything struggles without water in these conditions-sound a bit like your 1st property in Portugal! Hopefully it is still viable because, even though vacuum sealed, the pack says it expired years ago. But we all know not to trust best before dates.
So that's why my runner beans don't fruit! I will look at those other bean families.
Thanks's for taking the time to reply.

Burra, did your runner beans produce a tuber to eat? Phaceolis coccinueus does produce that edible tuber. I was wondering if energy went to the roots if it wasn't producing beans

Robert Ray wrote:Burra, did your runner beans produce a tuber to eat?

Interesting! I don't know about Burra, but I got bigger roots than I would expect under my runners-I may have pulled them early in disgust. Are they any good? Do they store well underground/in a cellar?

Jill Dyer wrote:I can't grow Phaseolus coccineus either!  Drying out of pollen also affects the tomato plants. . .

I am so glad I am not the only one struggling to grow beans! I grew them for years on the hot highveld in South Africa-like weeds! But our rainfall was more summer showers so probably more humidity. Successful in the UK too. The  combination of hot, dry, windy conditions here must just be too much for them to cope. Interesting about tomatoes. My friendly neighbouring farmer (who speaks spanish very well), surprisingly cannot understand me ;-) so I have trouble finding out how/where he grows such exceptional tomatoes. He keeps us stocked up but it's disheartening to struggle so. Interestingly, the self seeding tomatoes take off really early so we get early season tomatoes, they die back in the heat of the summer and don't come back when it cools down a bit in September, but then my planted varieties seem to get a growth spurt and I had tomatoes into November last year. So the reduced pollination in high summer makes sense and I'll try altering my sowing dates for early and late tomatoes. Thanks for that!

I have never grown Scarlet Runner beans, but having learned that they produce an edible tuber and you can grow them from the tuber is interesting to me. I hope someone here can tell me more about them. I just made an assumption that since no fruit was being produced the energy might be going to the roots.

Robert Ray wrote:Burra, did your runner beans produce a tuber to eat? Phaceolis coccinueus does produce that edible tuber. I was wondering if energy went to the roots if it wasn't producing beans

I never dug them up to find out, unfortunately. And I didn't try again, at least, not until this year!

A few weeks ago I happened to find myself outside the only shop I know that sells the local version, feijoca, which are eaten as the dry bean rather than the immature pod. So I bought some and put a handful in a pot to grow. I've just planted those out in the GAMCOD bed because I didn't have anywhere else prepped for them. I have no idea if they'll cope because they don't really have anything to climb up unless they manage to hang on until the corn and the fartichokes get a bit taller, but I'll watch them and see what happens and attempt to dig up some roots this winter to see what they are like.

And of course the leaves are edible too. So now I'm going to have to experiment with those, even if only to keep them at a sensible height because I wasn't prepared for them with poles for them to grow up...