Hybrid Beans

[Joseph Lofthouse]

For years, I have loved playing with hybrid beans. I watch my fields closely for naturally occurring hybrids, and plant them preferentially the next year. Collaborators send me hybrids they find in their gardens. I love them!!!

Andy B has been hand pollinating beans and sharing the seed with me. The past few years, I have grown F1, F2, and F3 tepary beans that he shared with me. What a wonderful way to select for local adaptation! The segregating hybrids have been very productive for me. With every seed being genetically unique, it is like trialing hundreds of varieties each year.

This year Andy also shared F1 interspecies hybrid bean seed with me: Common beans X Runner beans. The cotyledons were located mid-way between typical of common beans and runner beans. The flowers were scarlet, but paler than is typical of scarlet runners. The bean pods looked like runner beans. The seeds looked like runner beans. They were almost too long season for my garden. The night before hard frost, I collected pods to try again next year. The pods were very green. Some of them produced seed that looks viable.  There is a nice stash of seed.

Some years ago, Tim Springston of Oxbow Farm shared hybrid common beans with me. I reselected for bush type, and they have been part of my landrace ever since. One of my favorites I call Oxbow Farm Black Anasazi in my personal notes. The other beans in that photo also came from Tim's hybrid.

[Doro]

They look wonderful!
I have no bean breeding project yet, but am thinking about giving it a try next summer. The flower shape scares me though lol so fiddly!
I'm not very lucky with common bean growing. Soil temperature stays too low here for most varieties and the long photoperiod is making things even more difficult. Most varieties flower too late and don't make ripe seed. I found one bush variety (searching since 10 years lol) which gives a decent harvest. I tried adapting it to my conditions by selection, but hit a wall. Very uniform plants, must be fairly inbred already.
My old family runner bean, has adapted fine to its 'new' garden the past 12 years. Stabilizing the different colour lines is progressing nicely too. But most important, it does not mind cold feet or long days. Being a runner it grows huge though, not a field plant and trellis space is limited. Pollination has been an issue lately too.
An interspecific hybrid of both could be interesting. Having a bush bean with the hardiness of my runners would be a dream.

I'd like to learn some more about colour genetics in the dried beans, to make a better decision on which line of my runners to cross with the one common bean variety I can grow. But I could not find much online... probably I'm not using the right key words when searching. Could you help me with a link or the proper English search terms please?

Adding a picture of grandmas runners and the only common beans that grow for me.

[reed]

I also got some of Andy's common/runner crosses. The vines were absolutely huge with extreme amounts of flowers and pods but a lot did not mature seed, despite that I got plenty. If I remember right Andy said this generation would not produce as well as following generations would.

They look very much like some other runners I have except seeds and pods are smaller.
On the left are the beans from Andy's seeds. I had two vines, one was more productive than the other the top ones are more brown color, I only got a dozen or so of those, I got about a cup full of the others. those big ones on the right are some of my regular runner beans.

[Oxbow Farm]

They look wonderful!
I have no bean breeding project yet, but am thinking about giving it a try next summer. The flower shape scares me though lol so fiddly!
I'm not very lucky with common bean growing. Soil temperature stays too low here for most varieties and the long photoperiod is making things even more difficult. Most varieties flower too late and don't make ripe seed. I found one bush variety (searching since 10 years lol) which gives a decent harvest. I tried adapting it to my conditions by selection, but hit a wall. Very uniform plants, must be fairly inbred already.
My old family runner bean, has adapted fine to its 'new' garden the past 12 years. Stabilizing the different colour lines is progressing nicely too. But most important, it does not mind cold feet or long days. Being a runner it grows huge though, not a field plant and trellis space is limited. Pollination has been an issue lately too.
An interspecific hybrid of both could be interesting. Having a bush bean with the hardiness of my runners would be a dream.

I'd like to learn some more about colour genetics in the dried beans, to make a better decision on which line of my runners to cross with the one common bean variety I can grow. But I could not find much online... probably I'm not using the right key words when searching. Could you help me with a link or the proper English search terms please?

Adding a picture of grandmas runners and the only common beans that grow for me.

Hey Doro,  I don't know much about color genetics of beans, but I do know that there are two separate domestication events in P. vulgaris one is called Meso-American and the other Andean.  The two lines are genetically distinct, and distinguishable somewhat by phenotype.  I'm given to understand that most large seeded P. vulgaris are likely descended from the Andean type, and this was the type that was first introduced widely in Europe.  Meso-American is typically smaller seeded. 

The two types are fully interfertile, except there is a root-shoot incompatibility in the embryo of the F1 which typically kills them during germination.  If the embryo successfully manages to sprout adventitious roots above the radicle it can survive and grow, but most of them die.  So this results in something of a crossing barrier that is fairly easy to overcome if you work at it, but results in low levels of crossing between the two types.  It might be possible that one or the other type might cross more easily with coccineus?  No idea though. 

In terms of color genetics, the only thing I know for sure is that black is very dominant over other colors except some of the white patterns, and that horticultural seed coat patterns seem pretty dominant too over solid colors. 

[Raymondo]

Hi Doro, I tried ‘bean seed coat colour inheritance’ and came up with this http://edepot.wur.nl/290962
It’s not much but there is some useful info there.

Also found this pdf with a list of genes http://arsftfbean.uprm.edu/bic/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bean_Genes_List_2017.pdf

[Doro]

I had no idea that there are two types of P. vulgaris. Food crop history is such a complicated and interesting thing. So much to learn!
I am thinking that our beans here are from the larger seeded type from the Andes. Small seeded beans with almost round seeds are a rare find in the dry bean food isle and always imported from quite far.
I have read about crosses of P. vulgaris x P. coccineus in other garden forums, they seem to happen on very rare occasions here. And I have grown the UK variety Moonlight, which is such a cross. It's a commercially available runner bean with some common bean traits. It was ok, but I liked my old runners better in terms of hardiness and taste. I'm more interested in a cross the other way around, a common bush bean with runner traits. I think I'll really try that next summer.

Coat? I never thought of that, ha. Thank you Raymondo!
I'll see if I can code my beans with the list of genes now and do some guestimations of what might happen when I cross them.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

The last couple days, I cleaned and sorted the bean seed. A good number of these are recently descended from hybrids. I "normalized" the population, like I do most years, to plant more of the rare seeds, and fewer of the most common. Since I'm growing for seed for people in exotic places, (any place more than 50 miles away), I want to keep as much diversity in the population as possible. If I only planted bulk seed, some varieties would come to dominate the population (pinto beans, pink beans). Sorting the beans, also helps me to find varieties that might be new F1 hybrids. So I try to capture unique beans into this population as well. For example, how about those purple beans along the right edge of the photo? And the bean right above it is a type that I know, but the seed size is much larger than I have seen before. Those plain brown/gray beans make my eyes bug out trying to sort. I'll also plant bulk seed, to compensate for sorting errors. I was almost done sorting when I noticed several new types that had escaped my gaze previously.