Be careful of catalog copy. Your first and last entries are the same variety.

Trail of Tears is a great black bean for soup. But I wouldn't call it early maturing. In my garden it's one of the latest to mature. But with 150+ frost-free days, you've got plenty of time.

Don't forget, too, that you can always pre-start them, and get a jump on the weather that way.

Keep in mind that those days-to-maturity figures are, at best a guide to when you can harvest fruits. Excluding, for sake of discussion, all the factors that effect DTM, if you have a 70 day maturation it means on day 70 you should be able to harvest a fresh pod. For dried-on-the-vine beans, add another month to that at least.

I grew Black Seeded Blue Lake back in 1985. As I recall it produced very well. What I don't recall is how easy it was to shell. Another suggestion might be to look into Aunt Marge's Black, which if I recall correctly, is a black seeded version of Kentucky Wonder. That would be a high producer, fairly early and easy to shell. I also grew it in 1984 or 1985, but for reason of conditions it didn't make a good crop that year and I lost my seed in my various moves. But I'm positive that it wasn't the variety's fault.

I have a "variety," perhaps better said a landrace mix, from the Mexican state of Veracruz. It is a small black seeded runner (non climbing). I call it Mecatlán Black. It would do excellently for a soup bean and is extremely early and prolific. It's seed is small and pretty round. I've actually harvested a handful of dry seed at 44 days(just once)! Generally, however, the whole plant dries down and is ready for threshing at about 85 days. I hope to grow out a quantity this year (just reminded myself). This bean would make a wonderful cover crop.

George
Tahlequah, OKI calle

George, SESE catalogs a black-seeded Kentucky Wonder.

I have seed for it, but have never grown them. According to the description: Germinates well in cool soil. 84 days (Heirloom from central Ohio. Original seed from Tom Knoche's Aunt Marge who kep this variety alive for 60 years). Good flavor and texture. Kentucky wonder type pods are large, long, stringless, fleshy, and fiberless. Pods range from 6-8" long, containing 8 to 10 seeds per pod.

So I'm guessing this is the same as the Aunt Marge you're recommending.

I hesitate to recommend this one given the number of outstanding heirloom varieties available, but it is a pretty good dry bean and is commercially available. SuperMarconi is sold by www.growitalian.com and makes a very heavy crop of wide flat pods with lots of black beans inside. It can be used as a snap bean though the flavor is a bit odd to me. The dry beans are another story. I've cooked them a few times and enjoyed the flavor especially seasoned with salt and a bit of hot pepper. They produce heavily in a relatively short period of time.

Fusion

I will second Gardenlad's recommendation for "Cherokee Trail of Tears"; the vines are extremely vigorous, and bear heavily. The ripening pods turn a dark purple, giving the vines an almost ornamental appearance.

The only black-seeded pole bean that I grow regularly for its seed is actually a yardlong bean, "Liana". I harvest all of the immature pods until a little more than a month before frost (just before Labor Day), after which I let all remaining pods dry for seed. The beans mature & dry quite rapidly, and the yield as a second crop is quite high. The taste is like a rather sweet blackeye pea; I use them in chili to give it more color & flavor.

Marquette, I understand your preference for pole varieties, since I share that sentiment... but many of the best black soup beans are bush, or half-runner. "Black Turtle" (known by many other "turtle" names) is the standard for black soup beans. "Black Coco" & "Black Valentine" are two others.

If the black color was not a necessity for your soup beans... well, that would really open up a lot of choices.

Gardenlad, yes, that's the bean I was referring to. Back when I received seed, it was from Tom Knoche, and he mentioned something like "this bean might be A.K.A. Black Seeded Kentucky Wonder."

Back in the early and mid 80's I was still in the the phase of always wanting to grow more kinds of vegetables. Then, when we left the country, I lost most of my seeds. When I started getting them back I decided to try to limit myself in what I would actually grow. I was finding so many seeds, out in the hills of Mexico, that I realized I couldn't grow everything, and we were losing the joy of growing our own heirlooms. That's the only reason I never added this bean back to my collection. I'm sure its a good one.

I remember this bean as having very beautiful, large, flattened black seeds, which were quite shiny.

George

Thank you very much Gardenlad, George, Fusion, and Zeedman for all your extremely helpful information and advice.

IÂm summing it up this way:
Pole:
Trail of Tears, late, prolific (thank you Gardenlad and Zeedman)
Liana (yardlong), prolific, good snap and dry, (thank you Zeedman)
Blue Lake (black-seeded), late maturing, easy/difficult to shell? (thank you George)
Tom KnocheÂs Aunt MargeÂs Black, (a.k.a. black-seeded Ky.Wonder), fairly early, easy to shell, prolific, large flattened shiny seeds, (thank you George and Gardenlad)
Super Marconi, early, snap(?) and dry, prolific (thank you Fusion)

Three Bush varieties: (thank you Zeedman)
Black Turtle (and other "turtle" names)
Black Coco
Black Valentine
Mecatlán Black (non-climbing runner), very early, prolific, (thank you George)

Fusion, if you had time, would you care to mention some names of the that you had in mind?

Zeedman, you mentioned that IÂd love to hear some of the choices you had in mind (if you had time to elaborate........)

George, your Mecatlán Black sound like a winner. When you say itÂs a runner, how does that differ from a bush-habit bean? Given a support, would it climb?

Again thank you for taking time to post and sharing your knowledge with the rest of us. ItÂs a very generous gesture.

Marquette, Mecatlán Black is a non-climbing runner. There are climbing runners out there. But this one, though it puts out vines to about 3 1/2 or 4 feet, absolutely won't climb. I had one volunteer in my okra last year, and not knowing what it was, but really liking it's vigor, I left it to grow, supplying it with a pole, just in case. It wouldn't take hold of the pole or the okra, for that matter. Rather it spread out a couple feet on either side, flowered, produced lots of beans and then dried down.

I plant Mecatlán Black in a wide row and let it smother any weeds which would try to come up among the plants. It produces a mass of vines, none of which grab onto anything. At most I've seen this one kind of flop over some twigs I put up for it. But it didn't grab them.

This seed was given to us by the mother of a close friend of ours (who lived with us for two years) while we were in Mexico. The family hails from Mecatlán, Veracruz, not too far from Poza Rica. This bean is interplanted with corn, on steep hillside fields of clay soil. Mecatlán is at an altitude of about 3000" if I recall. I've been there. It can be rather cold and damp in the winter and hot and dry for a couple months around April and May. Land races which are traditionally used in this Totonac Indian village are HARDY. I'm sure that in Mecatlán they plant this bean in February and harvest April and May. They may do a second planting. But as we never lived there, I'm not sure about this.

This variety is not very good for snaps. Some pods are "okay" for snaps. Some are absolutely too tough. But it is incredibly productive as a dry bean.

Uh, guess I left out an important detail. The best way I know to harvest this bean is to let the plants start yellowing and then pull and hang them to dry, threshing them latter. The pods shatter easily.

George, your posts make fascinating reading. Would you care to discuss "land race"-type beans further. I'm sure many other folks on GW are unfamiliar with them and would enjoy reading more.....

Lucky you to have such a fine family heirloom (with a wonderful personal history).

Thanks for your generous posts.

A landrace is a variety (named or not, as George points out) that has unique characteristics, and which is found in a relatively small geographic area or ethnic community, and grown nowhere else.

Cherokee White corn, for instance, is (or was) a landrace; as is the Corky bean, Striped Bunch bean, and many others.

My experience in Appalachia has been the opposite of George's. Because until fairly recently every hollow was a separate country, there was little mixing and matching. Everybody in a community grew the same beans, and corn, and melons, and etc. Those varieties were adapted to that community (and, hence, were often landraces)or even to just a single family, who grew them over and over again.

Thus, we find a lot of bean (and other) variety in that largish geographic area called Appalachia. But there is little crossing, because other varieties were not grown near enough to matter. The variety we now call Big John bean, for instance, has been in the same family for more than 200 years.

George's other point is very well taken as well. Varieties may have had a name, at one time. But across the generations they merely become the one we grow, as in "that yellar tomato," or "them striped beans."

"I've observed the same with some people from Appalachian backgrounds. Hence their seed will usually manifest a lot more variation than a modern variety."

Obviously, my experience with Appalachian culture is more limited than Gardenlad's. Here is what I observed, which prompted this comment:

When living/working/studying in Northern Indiana I worked at a grocery store as a carry out (back in the early to mid 80's). At that time I often encountered transplants from KY as well as genuine "Old timey Hoosiers" real country folk from that region. A couple of times I carried out for someone like this, and struck up a conversation about gardening. A couple times, the person would happen to actually have, with them, some seed and offer me some. Most memorably was a woman who pulled out a quart jar of bean seed. It was mainly white, but mixed with a couple brown and black seeds of varying size and shape. This was her "bean seed." She poured out a handful and gave it to me. (One of the most appreciated tips I ever received!)The predominant seed I introduced into the Seed Savers Exchange as "Silver Lake," named after the town in which the woman lived. It was a very early and vigorous producer of beans, very similar, except in seed color, to Kentucky Wonder. (Someday I need to request this seed back again, and compare it to White Seeded Potomac Pole Bean) Unfortunately, I only received one other seed in that handful, ONE coffee colored bean, which was eaten by a slug after sprouting. This is what led me to believe that folk from this tradition didn't tend to keep their seed separate; especially since I later observed this behavior in Mexico.

Our discussion may wander a bit. But this is truly educational!

George

My grandmother kept her bean seed in the freezer in a bag. If she found a new variety that she liked, she just added a handful of seed to her bag. When she died, i got her bag of seed and separated out 9 separate and distinct varieties of beans. Eight of them were heirloom varieties she had collected in the hills of south central Tennessee. One of them was seed I had given her of a commercially available heirloom.

When it came time to plant beans, she just grabbed the bag and spread seed in the row. Whatever came up was what she fixed fresh snap beans from and canned from and eventually saved seed from. I found it interesting that she had very carefully saved the beans that she liked. They are uniformly fiberless and good snappers. Some have strings and some don't.

Fusion

Re: >Our discussion may wander a bit. But this is truly educationalWander on.......the posts make excellent reading.......

Well, there you go Fusion_power. That's what I saw. But then, I wasn't exactly in the Appalachians, just dealing with some folk with that back ground. Anyway, it fascinates me. This other way of selecting works in its own way.

George

George,

Thanks for all the knowledge you impart and share in such a kind manner. A question: you mention Mecatlan at 3000 feet altitude growing this black half-runner; another such 'Matiado' 'landrace' being prized at the Tlatlauqui market. I believe elsewhere [re: squashes?] you had mentioned altitudes of 7000 feet [as I had lived in India at 7500 feet].

Did you note any special selection of bean races for easier cooking in their dry stages, given the lower boiling point the higher you go and the more expensive it is to cook your food?

Thanks.

gautam

No Gautam, I haven't noticed that. However, it was pretty common knowledge, wherever we lived in Mexico, that beans that were more recently harvested cooked more easily. They don't have to boil in order to soften. One way we've cooked beans, when not in any hurry is to bring them up to boiling, cover, turn off the heat, and let them set for about a hour. Then we'd turn the heat back on and cook. I can't remember just how much longer we'd cook them. But they cooked up as if they had been on the heat even for that hour, when in fact they weren't.

Also, for anyone who doesn't know it. The best way I know, to tell if a bean is properly done, is to spoon it out of the pot hot, and blow on it. If the bean's skin splits, it's done to perfection!

Some people in the USA have told me that they can't cook beans; that they've tried, but that they never get soft. More often than not it's not their fault. They got hold of old beans which may have sat on the shelf for a long time. Those beans sometimes won't soften properly, not matter how long one cooks them.

I don't know how well it works. But some Mexican friends have told me that such old beans can be softened if you hang'em in a sack, under the drip line of your house's roof and let them absorb water a day or two before you try cooking them.

George

PS. Tlatlauqui is at 7500 feet altitude. The place receives about 11 feet of precipitation a year because it is on the Eastern slope of the Sierra Madre Oriente mountains, at just the right place to catch the warm moist air coming off the Veracruz coast. Everything is green and beautiful, especially when the sun comes out. But there were definitely challenges for gardening and for human health.

>Some people in the USA have told me that they can't cook beans; that they've tried, but that they never get soft.It's true, older beans take longer to cook. However, beans that don't soften at all usually are a sign of having tried to cook them in salted water. The salt keeps the beans tough.

Salt should only be added in the last 5 minutes of cooking.

"Salt should only be added in the last 5 minutes of cooking."

Huh... I've always added salt at the very beginning, without problems. This is how our friend, Juana, back in Tlatlauqui, taught us. Will have to experiment and see if I can observe any difference. Perhaps I could have been saving on energy all these years and didn't know it!

George

PS. Folks, just to let you know I'll be in Mexico Feb 10-24, 2007. Probably won't be online very much. So, if you don't hear from me, it's not because I'm ill or upset, etc.

PSS. By Feb 25 I WON'T want to eat beans for a while! Where I'm going they're on the menu three times a day, every day! I suspect that when you don't eat a lot of beans in your regular menu, your system has more trouble handling them. When we lived there I can't recall having problems with it. But now, after the first 5 or 6 days I'm getting uncomfortable.

The non-softening of the beans may have something to do with the pH of the water in which they're cooked. I don't remember the specifics, but I saw it on America's Test Kitchen a few weeks ago. They tested batches with baking soda and/or vinegar in varying amounts. Some of the beans exploded out of their skins, forming a mushy mess and some stayed whole and tough no matter how long they were cooked. I don't remember which batch was which, though!

MacMex, sorry to hear of your discomfort. Get some "te de gengibre" -- ginger tea. or just get a knob of fresh ginger, cut into pieces, boil for 15 mins, let it sit a little, then drink. Old Puerto Rican recipe.

When I was last in Monterrey, MX, I learned to cook "frijoles de olla" (pinto beans in a pot) with a handful of the herb epazote. I was told it made them easier to digest.

This probably coming too late, but if you see it, try these things, or try to eat more tortilla, less beans.

Buena suerte!

I'm still down here and haven't had much problem this time around. Guess it's another one of those mysteries! But thanks for the suggestion. I LOVE eposote!

George
Currently in Tasquillo, Hidalgo, Mexico