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.

[William Schlegel]

I think it has been a few years since I grew out my beans again. Not sure exactly how many. I have a nice mixture of Joseph's and Carol's. Some from seed trades quite a few years ago, some of the old Three Tribes of the Upper Missouri heirlooms from North Dakota, and some from local seed companies. Last time I grew them very mixed together and with very close spacing. It would be lovely to detect a natural cross, but I think I wouldn't remember all the colors and types I already had at this point.

[reed]

Natural crosses in beans are hard to find. For one thing, if you like to eat snap beans many of them don't ever have a chance to be found. In dry beans, you have to keep a very close eye, or they just get mixed up in a way where they can never be identified for sure.

You can make them on purpose by planting a single distinctive bean, like solid white or black among distinctly different types but then you have to plant every seed from that one plant the next year. It is doable and totally random crosses happen now and then too, but I found it more trouble than it's worth because I didn't see any noticeable improvement in the hybrids or the segregations that resulted from them. They are all still in my dry bean mix, but I would be hard pressed to single one out.

I'm a bit jealous of the pictures of all the pretty colored beans. I have a lot of different looking beans but most all of the bright colors seem to select themselves out of my garden. Trying to change that by planting them over and over again was distracting too much from the goal of having plenty to eat.

[Cathy A]

Reed,

It's a challenge for those of us with small gardens to mix trialing and breeding projects with actual food production. I'm in that group myself.

I like to trial, experiment, and hope to do some crosses, but I am not willing to reduce food production at current food prices!

I think finding natural crosses is more of a project for a William with access to larger fields and not really seeking food production.

[William Schlegel]

It would be nice to get food production and plant breeding accomplished simultaneously. I think it can be done. With a crop where the seed is the food like beans it might be a simple matter of saving any extra different looking ones for replanting each year.

[reed]

It would be nice to get food production and plant breeding accomplished simultaneously. I think it can be done. With a crop where the seed is the food like beans it might be a simple matter of saving any extra different looking ones for replanting each year.

I think is possible, but still necessary to focus more on one than the other. It's really easy with things that easily cross on their own or that are easy to hand pollinate. If you want diverse radishes, just plant a bunch and save seed from the best, the bees do all the work. I measure the best in radishes by how well they volunteer and the flavor and texture of the seed pods. Corn is really fun because you can see some changes in the F1 and even if you can't, like if you crossed two solid white varieties, you can still be sure of the cross because it is so easy to eliminate pollen from one of them.

Tomatoes are hard because you have to wait and look for phenotypical differences in the plants and fruits rather than just the color of the seeds and if you aren't skilled at hand pollinating you can't be sure you even have a cross, so you have to grow a lot of plants. You might need hundreds of plants when space only allows for, and food production only calls for twenty. I'm set with tomatoes though because the crosses you did yielded good tomatoes in the F1. No reason to expect the F2 and 3 and so on will not continue to yield good tomatoes so we can just eat them as I continue selection for the best ones. No extra space or effort needed, and no reason not to expect that if I manage to make my own crosses, (good A x good B) that the results won't also be good. I don't have to sacrifice production space on a gamble. Same with the natural cross that happened with my currant tomatoes. Still a larger number of plants would probably show faster results if the primary goal was breeding.

Until about ten or so years ago I didn't grow many beans for drying, we ate them all as green beans, so that 2 or 3 percent that may have been crossed had little chance of discovery in the few I saved for seed. When I started saving a lot more for dry beans I started finding off-types, enough so that I think crossing in beans is more common than generally believed. It's even more tricky because you generally can't find them in the F1, instead an entire plant shows off-type in the F2. When you plant the F2 you end up with several new kinds in the F3. They all got mixed up in my dry bean mix so it may be the new ones I find now are not a lot of new crosses, but instead they might just be segregations of just a few crosses that happened a few years ago. I tried keeping track of them for a while, but it just got to be more trouble than it was worth. I know there are recent, within the last ten years, crossed beans in my mix but I haven't yet seen anything that stands out as more adapted or productive. My grocery store pinto beans, my old favorite KY Wonder and my mixed-up greasy beans are still the most productive and resilient of the bunch. Together they probably make 50% or more of my dry bean mix and I grow the separately too for green beans to eat fresh and can. The greasy beans, I'm sure crossed with each other quite a lot.

I'm guessing that cow peas and peanuts are like beans, with little to no hint of crossing in the F1 but I've only been growing them for about five years and haven't seen anything yet. It's a case where if I devoted my entire garden to just one of them, I'd have a better chance, but I can't do that. Or maybe if I planted an entire crop from one year, instead of eating most it, but I don't want to do that either.

[Cathy A]

I think is possible, but still necessary to focus more on one than the other. It's really easy with things that easily cross on their own...

Landraces are an excellent choice for a mix of breeding and food production. The plants cross on their own, do much of their own selection, and most culls will still be edible!

Tomatoes are hard because you have to wait and look for phenotypical differences in the plants and fruits rather than just the color of the seeds and if you aren't skilled at hand pollinating you can't be sure you even have a cross, so you have to grow a lot of plants. You might need hundreds of plants when space only allows for, and food production only calls for twenty.

There's another problem, too.

Maybe your garden is big enough to support either 500 tomato plants, *or* 50 tomato plants, 50 cucumbers, 3 zucchini, a few dozen lettuce, etc., etc.

Breeding would call for the big tomato patch; food production for the mix of different types.

You mentioned dry beans. While dry beans grow well here, the fact that they only produce one crop of er season makes them a much poorer fit than green beans for a small garden.

Another example:  I eat a lot of chickpeas, but it's really hard to justify giving them growing space given their low productivity per plant.

The work done on dwarf tomatoes is extremely valuable to those with small gardens.