Tepary beans

I'm planning for next year, and I'm reading interesting things about tepary beans.

Apparently they diverged from common beans to become more drought & heat tolerant, yet can tolerate light frost for a few days too.

I'm interested to know what are the outer "edges" of where people are usefully growing tepary beans.

How much light, heat, water do they need to thrulive? What can they survive away from that optimum?

Our summers are too hot & dry for fava, common or runner beans to thrive.

Could they do OK in central England?

We grow tepary beans in the high desert. It is not unusual in late summer to have 95 Fahrenheit  during the day and 30 Fahrenheit  at night. Our experience has been to hit them hard with irrigation in the spring and the dwindle to near zero through the season. 4200 elevation in the rain shadow of the Cascade mountains.

I grew them for two or three years when I lived in California where the summer was hot and dry. Comparing them to ordinary bush beans, which I also sometimes grew, I found that they needed about half the irrigation.  I also grew Hopi blue corn and blue squash and found this was the case for them also, compared to other varieties of corn and winter squash.  These breeds are simply adapted to need less water.  The teparies are mostly a dry bean....I don't think it would work to try to eat them as a green bean pod and all.

Robert Ray wrote:We grow tepary beans in the high desert. It is not unusual in late summer to have 95 Fahrenheit  during the day and 30 Fahrenheit  at night. Our experience has been to hit them hard with irrigation in the spring and the dwindle to near zero through the season. 4200 elevation in the rain shadow of the Cascade mountains.

That's really interesting!  So that's 35 C day and -1 C at night, 1280 m elevation.  The pattern of preciptation we got this year was very wet until mid-April, then a two-day heatwave (c. 30 C) then frosty nights (-3 C) right into mid-May with more average rain, and then drought & heatwaves (3% of previously typical rain, and often 30-35C from mid-Jun until the third week of Aug.

So this sounds like similar enough to your situation to be very well worth trying.  Thank you!

Alder Burns wrote:I grew them for two or three years when I lived in California where the summer was hot and dry. Comparing them to ordinary bush beans, which I also sometimes grew, I found that they needed about half the irrigation.  I also grew Hopi blue corn and blue squash and found this was the case for them also, compared to other varieties of corn and winter squash.  These breeds are simply adapted to need less water.  The teparies are mostly a dry bean....I don't think it would work to try to eat them as a green bean pod and all.

Thank you so much, that's fascinating and very helpful.  I eat a LOT of dry beans, so that's great for me.