Author Topic: Brighstone beans are rampant!  (Read 5775 times)

squeezyjohn

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Brighstone beans are rampant!
« on: June 28, 2016, 21:00:33 »
I planted all the Brighstone beans kindly sent to me by ACE last year along with a couple of other varieties of french beans and despite the really rather awful weather for growing most things this variety has massively outperformed all the other types I have in the ground.  Lots of the others are struggling at the bottom of their poles taking slug damage and generally not getting going ... but the Brighstone beans are almost all 6 foot up their poles and beginning to make flower buds.  This is a real victory because the climbing borlottis I have tried to grow before behave like the other varieties and struggle to get up the poles.

So my question is this.  Everything I've read about Brighstone beans has led me to believe that they're a dwarf or bush bean ... but these ones from ACE are definitely climbers.  Are there two different strains?

ACE

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Re: Brighstone beans are rampant!
« Reply #1 on: June 28, 2016, 21:35:47 »
Although the pods are 'striped' black and the flowers are pink, I daresay they are not exactly true nowadays as most grow them on allotments where there are also runners and dwarfs growing, so cross pollination is going to effect them. I did eventually get my seed from a Brighstone gardener who has only ever grown them and they grew up the poles just like yours. They are romping away on my site well ahead of the runner beans which were planted days apart. They did stand up to the early cold weather a lot better without yellowing, and I expect to be picking them next week to eat as runners. They can get tough very quickly, so I then use them as borlottis.

squeezyjohn

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Re: Brighstone beans are rampant!
« Reply #2 on: June 28, 2016, 21:45:51 »
Thanks ACE!  They are handsome plants ... I was planning on using them as borlottis myself but may try a few as young bean pods too.  I'm so pleased to find something that gets off to a quick start and will start making beans early on so they can all be ripe and dry before the autumn dampness sets in!

ruud

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Re: Brighstone beans are rampant!
« Reply #3 on: June 28, 2016, 22:16:46 »
I have a brighstone variety who is definatily dwarf.

galina

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Re: Brighstone beans are rampant!
« Reply #4 on: June 29, 2016, 09:08:09 »
]
I have a brighstone variety who is definatily dwarf.

Same here.  There is a possibility that older dwarf varieties can produce short runners, but never to the top of the pole.  Two possibilities - a cross (which can happen with French beans, but usually the incidence is low):  Have you kept one of the original seeds, Squeezy?  Because if you have a cross with a tall French bean, the resulting plants would be tall, but the seeds will be different from Brighstone seeds.  If you got an accidental cross, you (or Ace) would not have seen it, because the seed colour in an F1 crossed bean would be exactly the same as a true breeding.  This is a bit like a squash can be pollinated by any number of other squashes and still looks like the real variety, but the seeds inside are what has been crossed and will not breed true.

The other possibility I was going to suggest is that you might have ended up with seeds of the 'wrong' Brighstone, because there had been confusion when unsuspecting Ace was handed wrong 'uns by mistake.  In that case the seeds will be like the seeds you started with and we just don't know the name of that other variety.

Whichever it is, if they are thriving - what's not to like  :icon_cheers:  you just can't pass seeds on and call them Brighstone.

 :wave:

squeezyjohn

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Re: Brighstone beans are rampant!
« Reply #5 on: June 29, 2016, 09:20:40 »
The ones I planted were ACE's Brighstone ones (he also sent me the yin-yan beans he mistakenly called Brighstone in a different post here) ... both are climbing beans ... The beans when I planted them looked exactly like the Brighstone ones in pictures on the internet.  But maybe I'll just call them ACE's beans!

I though that dwarf bean varieties were a relatively new thing to facilitate harvesting by machine ... as Brighstone beans are supposed to date from 300 years ago at least in the legend that they come from a shipwreck ... it would be surprising if they were a dwarfing one.

galina

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Re: Brighstone beans are rampant!
« Reply #6 on: June 29, 2016, 09:54:53 »
Squeezy, dwarfing is a mutation that happens occasionally and people have 'always' treasured them because they don't need staking and are less prone to wind damage.  Mechanical harvesting is only one aspect of it and no doubt all dry beans that are mechanically harvested are short varieties.  But there are older reasons for growing short beans.  It does not clash with the legend.  In wild populations the dwarfs would just be crowded out, but in a gardening situation they can be preserved and protected. As dwarfing is a recessive gene, any that present as dwarfs will stay dwarfs from saved seeds, which made it easy for the gardeners of centuries ago. 

Ace is a great name for a bean  :icon_cheers:

PS Ruud and others via the seed circle got our seed of Brighstone from the Heritage Seed Library and they are dwarf and came from IOW according to their info.  We have grown several generations of the HSL seeds and they all were dwarf.  Maybe we need to name our 'Brighstones' as 'HSL Brighstone bean'  to avoid confusion. 

« Last Edit: June 29, 2016, 10:20:55 by galina »

squeezyjohn

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Re: Brighstone beans are rampant!
« Reply #7 on: June 29, 2016, 10:34:37 »
I imagine in all the years they have been grown from seed saved by IOW gardeners over many many generations there must have been a bit of diversity and some crossing with other types resulting in lots of different beans all of which were called Brighstone by their gardeners.

ACE

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Re: Brighstone beans are rampant!
« Reply #8 on: June 29, 2016, 10:48:55 »
http://www.iwcp.co.uk/news/gardening/a-twist-in-the-tale-of-the-brighstone-bean-31884.aspx


Now if the beans they saved for the heritage seeds were from Shanklin not Brighstone  which are opposite ends of the island  centuries later, there was bound to be a difference from the original Brighstone bean.  To travel from Brighston  the residents had quite a trek to get anywhere, just a trip into Newport now and again to get new strings for their banjos.


ps I had better be fair to Brighstone also known as the Back of the Wight, the home of Warrior the real War Horse and even though they still stone missionaries they had three bishops one of them being the son of William Wilberforce the anti slavery champion, oh and the Krays had a guest cottage there for visiting friends when they were on the island
« Last Edit: June 29, 2016, 11:07:58 by ACE »

steveg155

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Re: Brighstone beans are rampant!
« Reply #9 on: November 06, 2016, 11:41:00 »
Squeezy,

Hello, just curious if you have any saved seed from the climbing "Brightstone". If so, and you would be interested, I would love to make a trade with you for them, and any other climbing beans you may have that I do not currently have in my collection. I have a fair selection of climbers, really the only beans I grow because of space restrictions in my garden. Let me know. By the way, I am located in USA.

 

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