Topic: climbing beans cross pollinating?

[peanuts]

I've been growing Galina's North Carolina Long Speckled Greasy Cut-Short beans for some years.  They are so good! I do grow several other climbing beans (Kew Blue, runners, Spanish big ones for drying, and Borlotti) on  adjacent rows, or sometimes mixed rows, half and half.  This year for the first time, some of the N Carolina beans are showing touches of pink on the pods, and when I investigated, also on the beans inside.  But they are growing exactly like the NC beans, fat and tightly filled.  Is it possible they have crossed with borlotti? 

[squeezyjohn]

Yup ... beans will cross ... it's unlikely that runner type will cross with french beans ... but the closer they are to another type of bean, the more likely you will have crossing by pollinating insects.  Most crops have quite large isolation distances (a mile or so) ... luckily beans have an isolation distance of about 10ft!  So you can normally keep the seed stock clean by growing several wigwams or rows apart from eachother.

[galina]

Just like John said.  It is very unlikely that  a l l  of your beans were crossed.  One pod maybe.  Two at worst.  The crossing rate is said to be about 5%.  Chances are that most seeds in your seed stock are ok.  If all beans are affected, it could be an environmental effect too.  Do you still have old seeds Peanuts?  Kept dry bean seeds keep with good viability for 6 years or longer, so seeds saved from previous years will still be good to go

[Digeroo]

As Galina says if you grow French  beans a percent will be cross pollenated.  It is usual to rogue out any variant plants.   It is good also not to  only save from a very small number of pods.  If you only save two pods, then 50% of your seeds could be crosses.

I have been growing a yellow  bush (dwarf) bean called by HSL Hungarian wax, though Hungarian wax from other sources are totally different.    Suddenly this year one has got climbing genes.  Will probably keep it.   The slugs love the beans so a climber will make things more difficult for them.  Not actually seen many climbing large slugs.  Just hope the beans are the same.   It has kept the vigour of the mother variety.   

[earlypea]

I bought commercial seed of Marvel of Venice (because mine have expired) this year and was very disappointed to find that around a third of them had crossed with some boring green pencil bean.  Some were pencil-shaped yellow, some pencil-shaped green, even the more normal looking flat yellow beans weren't nearly as beautiful as I remember them from growing HSL seed - the pod shapes and colouring really weren't right..  Just goes to show sources are important!  I do wonder how that happened with commercial seed.  You'd imagine they'd space them out and grow a large quantity.