Pulling Parsnips

After a week of heavy rain, the garden was about as soggy as it gets–just right for extracting tenacious parsnip roots from the earth.
So between showers I put on my muck boots and tackled the row.  Last year’s foliage has all died back now.  Little fresh green shoots are just thinking about sprouting from the tops, so it’s time to bring them in before the new growth saps all the goodness from the vegetable.

The trick for getting parsnips out of the ground is to dig a fork-full of dirt away from the side of the roots.  It’s too easy to damage the  the root with the fork if you attack it straight on.   Pull the top of the root toward your excavation, grab hold firmly and PULL.  Nothing works as well as your muddy hand!  The variety that I’m growing are a German type called Halblange Wiesse (half-long white). When you are wrenching them from the ground, you appreciate that they are only “half-long” and have a good taper.
I pulled about three feet of row, got my bucket full of ‘snips and managed to get soaked as another downpour helped me hose them off.  Just as I finished, the sun peeked out for the photo.

I’m going to raise more seed again this year.  The easy way to grow parsnip seed is just to leave them in the ground and let them grow again in the spring. This time I want to more carefully select  the roots for planting again later.  I always look for nice shaped roots to plant for seed, but selecting for flavor is not as easy.

So after I cleaned them all, I picked out a dozen and a half nice looking ‘snips, and snipped off a piece of the shoulder on each root.  In batches of a few pieces, being careful not to mix up which root they came from, I steamed the sampled sections.  It was lunch time, so I did a taste test.  
There was definitely a  significant flavor variability in the samples. Nothing was bad, but some were better!  I culled about a third of the ones I sampled.  Those will still make some good roasted roots, or part of a vegetable soup.  The winners are bagged up in the vegetable fridge ready to go back in the ground again.   I plan to do the same thing again for the next couple of harvests to get around thirty roots to provide adequate genetic diversity for this year’s seed crop.

Viable seed life for parsnips is only about a year.  Maintaining the variety quality of an out-breeder like parsnips means you have to grow quite a few plants all the time and be continually selecting for the best.  Doing this every year to ensure good germination  produces quite a bit of seed — far more than I could ever use.

Which is why we have seed swaps.  Out-breeders especially, like the brassica (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, etc.), corn, carrots and parsnips require 30 to 50 plants (more for corn) each time you grow for seed to maintain sufficient genetic diversity and avoid inbreeding depression.  Even growing one or two of these crops for seed can require more space than a home gardener is willing to give, and then there will be way more seed than the grower can possibly use before it loses vitality.  But when serious gardeners each pick one or two varieties to shepherd, and then bring the surplus seed to local seed swaps, we all benefit from each other’s efforts.

If you want to enjoy the fruits of my effort, you can find my parsnip seed at the seed swaps I attend in Eugene, or from Adaptive Seeds.

Keeping our Bees Alive

A study just out from Purdue University researchers adds to the damning evidence that neonicotinoid  insecticides are killing our honeybees and native insect pollinators.  Neonicotinoid systemic insecticides are some of the most toxic substances to bees that were ever invented.  At the recommended application level, the amount of clothainidin on a single corn kernel has enough toxicity on contact to kill all of the bees in strong colony.  If the bees ingested the toxin, that single kernel’s worth of insecticide could kill all the bees in a dozen colonies.  Because this stuff is so toxic, the only allowed uses of some of these substances has been as seed treatments where the insecticide is less accessible to bees.  The Purdue study showed that despite the fact that the insecticide is buried with the seed, the bees can still get substantial exposure.  Insecticide was found  in corn pollen that bees were working as well as in dandelion flowers growing in fields being planted with treated seed, and more generally in the soil where crops with treated seed were grown before.  Tests showed pesticide residue in stored pollen and in poisoned bees found at affected hives during corn planting activity.  Contaminated talc, used to keep the seed flowing through the planting machines, is suspected as one way bees are contaminated as the talc is blown from the machines into the environment.

The problem is that there is no place for bees in America to hide.  Virtually all of the corn seed planted in this country is treated with clothainidin, as are soybeans, and many other crops.  If a field is planted in a commercial agriculture crop, chances are good the seed was treated with one variety of neonicotinoid or another. In the farm belt, fields stretch from fence-row to fence-row, mile upon mile with very little native habitat for bees or native insect species.  Honeybees placed near these fields are likely to suffer nutritional stress because of the lack of variety of pollen sources as well as low-level insecticide poisoning.  Still missing are good studies on developmental effects when the brood is fed contaminated pollen.

However, it’s unlikely that the neonicotinoids alone are responsible for honeybee colony collapse (CCD) that has plagued beekeepers since about the time that these new insecticides began being used heavily.  Rather, the picture emerging is one of a combination of stresses and pathogens that drive the colony to collapse.  As usual, one of the best sources for information on honeybee health and sickness is Randy Oliver’s Scientific Beekeeping site.  In the last year he has had a series of articles on Sick Bees, printed originally in the American Bee Journal, that are worth spending time digesting.  The picture Randy paints is one where a multitude of viruses, some recently introduced and some just part of the biological milieu that is a honeybee colony, become deadly to the colony when the bees are also infected with varroa and/or nosema.  Poor nutrition or pesticide poisoning can push marginal colonies with such infections  over the edge.

My bees are hunkered down for the winter now.  When we get a warm day I still see them testing the weather in the afternoon.  The filbert trees are already providing a bit of pollen if the bees can get it, but more likely they will just sit tight for another month.  Now is when diseased colonies will finally succumb to the cold.  Hives without sufficient numbers can no longer maintain a warm cluster, and the cold bees become even more susceptible to disease, accelerating the losses.  I occasionally put my ear to a hive and give it a sharp rap with my knuckles and listen for the response of the bees in the cluster.   The mite drop boards also give an idea of how large the cluster is by the extent of the debris field.

I gave my hives this cursory check this morning, and much to my dismay, it looks like the best producer last year is going down; barely a buzz and only a small amount of debris on the board.  I checked a few dead bees with the microscope, but no sign of nosema.  In all likelihood a virus is the proximate cause of their downfall.  It’s another case of the now all-too-familiar CCD symptoms.    I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that my other hives make it to spring.

Wealth and Inequality – Pareto, Gini and Contingency

The nature of inequality is a topic that is getting a lot of attention these days.  It’s worth taking a careful look at how inequality arises in our economy.  In fact, inequality is built into capitalism and it perpetuates itself, steadily increasing, even in the absence of greed.  Inequality naturally arises whenever future wealth is contingent upon the wealth you already have — almost the definition of capitalism — even if individual decision-making is no better than a throw of the dice.

Perhaps you’ve heard that 70% of the income is made by only 30% of the workers.  More curiously, if you look at the top 30% you will find that of those 30%, 70% of their incomes is made by 30% of the 30%.  In fact, you can keep doing this kind of dissection and you will come close to the actual income distribution in this country,  the form discovered by Pareto in 1906 to describe the distribution of wealth in society.  The Pareto distribution has a “fat tail”, because there are a lot more individuals at the extreme high-end tail than you would expect from just a random distribution with a similar spread.

The Model

I made a little Excel spread sheet experiment to see if I could generate a Pareto distribution with a simple model.  You can download the spreadsheet here.  In this model, wealth is won or lost with the toss of the dice.  Individuals start off with a modest nest egg that they can invest – but their success in the “market”  reflects the reality that the market as whole is a zero-sum game.  Their chance of winning is just the same as their chance of losing.  Statistically, this keeps the total average wealth more or less constant, but it allows for there to be individual winners and losers.

My little model starts out with all individuals with 100,000 units of wealth.  We roll the dice and the individual’s fortune is equally likely to increase or decrease up to a volatility rate, R.  We continue to roll the dice another 50 times, each time using the previous wealth value as the basis for the random percentage increase or decrease.  The Excel spread sheet contains 30,000 individuals to generate enough statistics to see the trends in the tail, and the results are shown in the charts above and below.

I arbitrarily set the volatility parameter, R, to 22% because after 50 cycles, the resulting distribution had a Gini coefficient  of about 0.46, which is  about the same value as for the U.S. income distribution.   (Note that the actual wealth distribution in the U.S. has a Gini coefficient of about 0.78.  The wealth distribution is much more skewed toward the wealthy than is the income distribution.)   The Lorentz curve for the model’s wealth distribution is shown below.  (Max O. Lorentz and Corrado Gini were turn-of-the-century thinkers that established the quantitative mathematics we still use to describe inequality.)

Using the Lorentz curve, we can do a little graphical math and find the Gini coefficient for the distribution.   The green curve in the upper chart shows the Pareto distribution that would have the same Gini coefficient found in the lower chart.  The wealthy “tail” of the distribution shows a clear power law characteristic.  My eyeball power law fit (red curve), does a pretty good job where the tail statistics are bigger than single digits.  The Pareto fit isn’t bad either, considering it was fit to the entire data set via the Gini parameter, rather than just to the wealthy tail.  For an individual sitting in the power law tail, the landscape looks the same regardless how far up the tail you go.  There are always those few that are richer than you, and the many that are poorer. The psychological stratification seen by an individual is pretty much the same all along the wealthy tail.

A few interesting things come out of playing with this model.  First, the volatility parameter strongly affects the rate of inequality growth.  More volatility means the bets are larger as a fraction of wealth, so changes each cycle are larger.  Second, although the growth rate of inequality slows after several cycles, it never stops getting larger.  The nature of the process is to spread the wealth; however, there is a zero lower bound but no upper bound.  This behavior is illustrated in the chart below.  

Discussion

Our model for wealth distribution generates reasonable looking distributions with only two requirements.  First, changes in wealth are proportional to an individual’s existing wealth.  Second, an individual’s success is merely a matter of contingency, the roll of the dice.    In many ways, these simple requirements describe capitalism.  Wealth is generated based upon the work of accumulated capital (wealth) rather than labor.  In practice, wealthy investors are making bets with peers that have similar levels of wealth.  Since neither side is actually creating wealth from raw goods, our model approximation, that on average there are equal numbers of winners and losers, is justified.

There are good arguments that too much inequality is detrimental to social well-being.  It is instructive to realize that the underlying mechanism for inequality growth need not include deliberate actions by wealthy individuals.  Without deliberate mechanisms to redistribute wealth downward, inequality will grow without bounds out of statistical necessity.  Managing inequality means introducing mechanisms that redistribute wealth more equitably which are at least as strong as the statistical effects which naturally concentrate wealth.

This is where greed comes in.  In practice, those that have attained wealth, even if by the throw of the dice, feel entitled to their fortune and resist any attempt at leveling the playing field.  Whether it is luck or skill that is involved in negotiating one’s bets, winners consistently attribute their success to skill, and with that comes a sense of entitlement to their winnings.

One  mechanism that would reduce the problem would be policies that reduce market volatility, since  limiting the size of gains and losses reduces the growth rate of inequality.  Tobin taxes on financial transactions, which penalize speculation, would seem to offer such a benefit.  Inheritance taxes which limit the transfer of wealth over generations are also extremely important to break otherwise ever-growing concentrations of wealth.

The Biggest Gift

It’s the giving season, so I was reflecting back on all I gave and received this year.  In America, the size of stuff matters, so let’s talk about big stuff!  Forget the little boxes with glitter and shine, even the biggest box under the Christmas tree can’t compare. I’m quite sure I got a bigger gift than most of you this year.  I’m talking tonnage.  My friend Mike gave it to me, and he even let me use his truck to bring it home.  Mike’s companion, Walter help make it.  Mike and Walter have had a good relationship for many years.  Every day, rain or shine, Mike provides food and drink for Walter and his clan.  Occasionally Walter allows Mike to jump on his back and scratch his ears.  Walter, king of his domain, is a large Black Angus bull with a very mild disposition.  He and his clan gratefully accept the hay and grain Mike provides and in return produce a copious pile of manure.

It’s part of the grand bargain, the circle of fertility that returns to the earth what we take from it to nourish ourselves.  This gift of fertility is indeed a big one.  It’s the foundation for everything that comes from my garden.  The seeds, vegetables, and garden meals that are often my gifts for friends and neighbors all require the fertility that comes from Mike’s manure pile.

The weather was nice enough yesterday that I got outside for a while, pulled up the old amaranth, and hauled a wheelbarrow of manure over to that patch of ground.  My pile is getting smaller, but there should be enough to give the ground a good perking up next spring.  There is never too much fertility!

Happy Holidays to all my loyal blog readers, and may the coming season be a fertile one!

December Salads

As November closed in on the garden this year, I provided a little protection for a couple of my salad beds.  Many salad plants are cold-hardy to well below freezing temperatures, but unprotected plants get battered by winter cold, wind and rain, and just never seem able to maintain enough vigor in the cold months to produce food.

A few weeks ago, I made a little shelter for my winter greens with a few pieces of bamboo and some floating row cover.  You can see the details of the simple cover construction in the pictures.  The row cover is inexpensive and reusable.  Bamboo is my choice garden construction material, providing stakes, supporting poles, and fabric hold-downs.

It’s been long enough now that I’m able to really notice the difference between the plants left outside the row cover and those within.  The lettuce especially is doing very nicely under the cover.  Plants with leaves taken for Thanksgiving are still growing and providing more under the cover, whereas those outside are at a standstill.

Much of the winter challenge is providing protection as well as good air circulation.  Individual plants need plenty of space, and I’ve found that the row cover with the ends open seems to work better than the bed where I closed down the ends.

Growth is slower in the winter, even with protection.  But garden space is at less of a premium as well, so you can triple your salad garden space over the winter to still have plenty of fresh greens.  Pests diminish as the temperatures drop.  Even slugs, although present, don’t seem as much of a problem in the cold.

Varieties make a big difference for cold hardiness.  My favorite winter lettuces are Continuity (a.k.a. Four Seasons), a red butter lettuce, and  Arctic Density romaine.  Other great winter greens include various mizunas and mustards, mache (a.k.a. corn salad), leafy endive, and arugula.  Most of these greens will survive the winter without protection, but, with the little bit of help the row cover provides, you will get more to eat!

Nothing can beat the flavor of winter salad greens.  Endives that are too bitter to eat in the summer become sweet and delicious.  The cold brings out the sweetness in everything, and slower growth means more crunch to the lettuce leaves.

Europe – Into the Abyss

Cover photo from the Economist about a year ago — now all too true.

As we watch the ongoing train wreck in the European Union, we can’t help wondering where it will all end up.  I search in vain on the internet for a discussion about the logical conclusion to this catastrophe, but few venture to put forth a picture of what’s to come.  Here is my best guess.

The fear of a Euro breakup has finally reached the point where Europe has isolated itself from the rest of the world.  No longer are non-European investors willing to risk their assets with any EU bank or sovereign debt.  The EU has become a financial island unto itself.  Outsiders would rather divest themselves of any European assets than take on more of them. We have a run on the bank, and the bank is Europe.

European investors are desperate for a safe haven, so US treasuries remain in demand.  European demand for non-European assets will act to diminish the value of the Euro.  This effect could boost exports of European goods and help at least the industrial core EU countries weather the storm, but this does nothing for the short term.

Within the EU, with foreign funding cut off, the resolution of the imbalances must be dealt with internally.  Greece is looking for loans from the ECB (European Central Bank) by December 9 in order to be able to roll its debt and avoid outright default.  However, after the recent political turmoil in Greece, the original agreement that called for more austerity measures in exchange for a 50% “voluntary” write-down on the current debt is now in doubt.  The Greeks now want to pay only 25% of their outstanding debt if they are to accept the rest of the deal.  This makes the “voluntary” nature of this credit event much more dubious, and suggests that CDS (credit default swap) insurance on these loans will eventually be triggered one way or another.  This could start the unraveling of banks on both sides of the Atlantic that have exposure.  No matter how you look at it, most of the Greek debt is held by German and French banks and investors, and they will take the biggest hit.

The demands of the core countries (Germany and France) reflect their self-interest in getting their money back.  But the bleeding of the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece & Spain) is a slow death for these countries and they are no longer willing or able to put up with it.  It’s been said that the best approach when in fiscal trouble is to default early but not often.   If you compare the trajectories of Iceland and Greece following the 2008 financial crisis, you can see why this is a good rule.  Iceland refused to put the sins of their bankers on the backs of their people, and have since begun a modest recovery from a desperate position.  Greece, saddled with the demands of membership in the EMU (European Monetary Union), could not easily make an early exit, and has suffered the consequences of a running five-year depression.

With Europe now cut off from outside funding given the present conditions,  either Germany accepts the position of lender of last resort by way of the ECB, or the rest of the periphery countries face the Greek fate.  It’s just a matter of time — perhaps just days, when one of the countries that can no longer afford ever-increasing demands from the EU core countries to fund their debt, will decide the value of continued membership in the EMU is no longer worth it. Then, brand new Lira , Pesos, or Drachmas will appear overnight.  The least pain will come to member states that don’t hesitate once the movement is underway.  This is very much like leaving the gold standard was 80 years ago.  Those who stuck it out (France) suffered the most while those who bailed first (Britain) quickly recovered because they finally had control over their own monetary policy.  With that in mind, it seems that once the exit starts it will unfold rapidly.  One can imagine that all of the PIGS bail out and declare their own Greek or Italian “Euro” that is initially pegged at the EMU Euro, but is destined for immediate devaluation as quantities of the new currency are printed to pay off the old debts and reduce domestic interest rates.

Germany and France are likely to come to bilateral agreements that maintain their union, as are other core countries.  The crisis will likely spark the necessary reforms so that what remains of the EMU will have the tools to deal with imbalances that are bound to develop.  Some of the ideas required for a fiscal union are floating around now, but the proposed legal treaties and reforms seem motivated by a German moral crusade rather than any credible path toward unwinding the present imbalances.   The puritanical legalese may be good enough to unite the core countries without big problems,  but the blame-the-victim tone almost guarantees that these measures will not be agreeable to the PIGS, and time is running out.

Once the first state leaves the EMU, world markets will be in free fall.  Italy or Spain’s departure will really stress the banks.  It seems likely that the process of rolling over Italy’s debt into a new currency with a questionable exchange rate would cause a “mark-to-market” evaluation of assets.  No bank would like to see anything like that happen when they are holding stressed assets that might be of dubious value in the first place.  Banks will not be in a position to trust each other to be solvent.  Credit will dry up.  This is the nightmare scenario that prompted Henry Paulson to demand a trillion dollar bail-out for the banks from President Bush after the Lehman Bros. default.  Who will come riding in this time?

What happens in a global economy when no one can exchange money?  I don’t know, but we might find out!

November Gardening

The summer gardening season is really over now.  The big Douglas fir trees in my yard that I complain about because of their shade also keep the frost away.  Most of my neighbors have had a killing frost, but my tomatoes are still slogging along.  The other summer crop still in the garden is my amaranth.  This year I tried planting a few seeds of the grain amaranth that I picked up at the local health food store.  But we had a late cool spring, a wet early summer, and the amaranth took its time maturing.  I have some nice pretty flower heads now, but the seeds are not fully mature and there is no hope for the seed heads to dry down now that the rains have started.  I’m not sure what variety this is, I’m guessing it’s Plainsman, but has quite a bit of variation in flower color.  There are a few plants approaching ten feet tall.  I’ve picked in a couple of plants and put them in a bucket of water in the garage to see if the seed heads will mature as the plants die back.  There are a few nice stems in a vase on the table as well, and if the flowers will yield any grain when they are no longer fit to look at, that might suggest what to do with the rest of the crop.  It would be a shame to lose it all.

Along the other part of my fence I had planted some more of the Copperhead amaranth I grew last year, planting it late and just scattering the seed.  The result was an overly dense stand that I had to thin extensively over the summer.  This was the first year for much of this bed, and it really needs some compost, so yields were low.  This photo was taken about a month ago, after I had just harvested most of the seed.  The harvest yielded a little less than a quart of grain, but at least the seed heads matured enough to release their seed.

The rest of the winter garden is quite happy.  There are a few collard plants that are asking to be noticed.   I’m waiting for a few good frosts to knock down the aphids on some of the Brussels sprouts and overwintering cauliflower, but otherwise all the Brassicas are still growing well.

There are still plenty of leeks and parsnips in the ground to provide good eating over the winter.  The ground where the squash was is now pushing up fava beans for the winter cover crop.  In the beds, continuity lettuce, winter giant  spinach, mache, and various other greens are providing fall salads.  Pretty soon I’m going to make them a shelter of floating row cover for the winter.

Now it’s about time to let the garden be for a while; time to sit around the wood stove and make music as the nights close in for the winter.

The Next Economic Crisis

It is becoming clear that the Europeans will not get it together to save the Euro and avoid a major debt crisis.  I guess we can hope that the next major crisis intervention meeting will produce results that prop things up for more than two days, but I’m not holding my breath.  The European approach has been characterized by draconian hard money policies and a demand for austerity, whether deserved (Greece) or not (Spain).  The result of these measures is the predictable Keynesian outcome of further depressed demand and higher unemployment. What was telling with this latest round of negotiations was the supposed capitulation by the banks to accept a 50% haircut on their Greek loans.  Merkel and Sarkozy gave them a take-it or accept-the-consequences deal; the fear of another Lehman event was greater than the pain of the losses, so they took the deal to avoid a “credit event” that would trigger action on the largely unknown quantity of credit default swaps (CDS) that could unhinge other financial institutions.  It seems that just about anything will be done to avoid the uncertainty associated with unmasking this unknown mountain of  CDS exposure.

Interest rates on Italian 10 Year bond

It appears that Italy is the next victim of the self fulfilling promise of austerity under the Euro.  Bond rates have been rising in Italy since early summer, but then in August, the European Central Bank (ECB) promised to buy enough Italian bonds to drive the prices back down.  But they have been inching back ever since, with fear that Italy would be the next victim after Greece was out of the way.  The big meeting with Merkel and Sarkozy was supposed to provide an answer that would calm the markets, as the ECB’s debt purchases did in August, but this time it only took a day for the true implications of the deal to sink in — that is was still too little, too late — and rates are on the rise again.

Demand for more austerity seems guaranteed to cause deeper recession in the affected countries, less tax revenue, and less ability to repay loans in a timely manner, leading to higher bond rates, leading to more demands for austerity…  you see where this is going.

So what does all this mean for us in the US?  Although this mess is largely a European problem, as the Lehman event showed us, everything is connected these days.  Right now, the uncertainty in Europe is making US treasuries at 2% look like a good safe haven.  The danger is from the feared “credit event”, when hedge funds and banks would be forced to reconcile their CDS bets.  There is a good possibility that a significant default event, from even a small county like Greece, could cause some major bank or hedge fund to become insolvent themselves, and subject to default on portions of their portfolio.  A sea of CDS bets could unravel in a tsunami of litigation and frozen credit.  With today’s global financial institutions, there would be no escaping the consequences of the global generalized bank run that would develop.

This is the scenario that must not be allowed to happen, that scared the bankers to accept their 50% losses on Greek debt.  Perhaps this will be the model for future banking negotiations –  capitulate or accept the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) consequences.  Maybe it will work.  After all, it kept us out of nuclear war for 60 years.

Bean Genes

The mysterious black beans continued to play on my mind last week.  Two things still needed more clarification.  First was the question of origin of my purported Gramma Walters variety, and the second was how bean seed colors work when you do a cross.

I talked with Andrew Still a bit more last weekend, and he is quite sure my pretty beans are ones he brought to that seed swap where I got them a few years ago, and that they came from somewhere in central Europe.  I’m waiting for the details…  In the mean time I’ll continue to call them Gramma Walters, but you might expect a correction in the near future.

I little research gave light to the origins of modern common beans.  There are two major ancestral gene pools  for the domesticated common bean coming from the Mesoamerica, (Mexico and Central America) and Andean (Peru and Chile) regions.  Most common bean varieties still can trace their roots (or genetic markers) to one region or the other.  For instance, what we call kidney beans (red, dark red, and white varieties) and cranberry beans derive from the Andean center of domestication (COD).  Modern varieties such as navy, small white, black beans, pinto and great northern all derive from the Mesoamerica COD.  Kentucky Wonder is also descendant from the Mesoamerica beans.  Curiously, most (70%) of traditional European bean varieties are descendant from Andean stock.  Apparently, the early explorers brought bean seed back to the continent largely from South America first to Spain and then disseminating to the rest of Europe.  Beans are one of the most easily saved seeds, so it is not surprising that there are hundreds of varieties surviving on family farms where traditional farming is still practiced.  I’m guessing that my pretty maroon and white beans come from this European heritage, and are probably descendant from the Andean COD.

So how could marbled maroon and white beans crossed with brown beans end up black?  Turns out that bean seed color has been investigated by many researchers over the past century, and at this point much is known about how the genetics of bean color works.  Considering the diversity of colors, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are several genes that determine the seed coat color.  Here is a partial list of bean genes, symbols and variations, and what they are thought to do that came from some of the references below.

Gene Symbol	Description
P	Main color gene.  Without P, other color genes are inactive.
p	Lack of P, seeds are colorless (white)
pgri	Allele of P, seeds are gray-white.   dominance is P > pgri  > p
C	Color gene required for full expression of color modifying genes. C usually  closely linked to R, dominant red color gene, and coded [C r]
c	Lack of C
J	Coat colors fully developed in immature seeds
j	Produces  pale coats colors in immature seeds
G	Color modifying gene for Greenish Brown
g	Lack of G
B	Color modifying gene for Yellow Brown
b	Lack of B
R	Red color dominant gene
r	Lack of R
rk	Red Kidney color – recessive gene
V	Violet  to black color gene – Intensifier for other color genes.
v	Lack of V
Asp	Glossy or shiny seed coat
asp	Dull seed coat
T	Total color coverage
t	Patterned color coverage; t/t produces white flowers without color,  except with V purple flowers.

A couple of things become apparent when we look at this list and try to write down the genotypes of the beans in my garden.  Here is what I get…

Gramma Walters:    Has color, so must have P; the maroon could be red, [C r].  Immature seeds are pale, so j likely. Must have V, otherwise where did the black cross come from.  Possibly [C r] and V get us maroon. Must have t to have patterned seeds.

Proposed genotype for Gramma Walters:  PPggbb[C r][C r]jjVVtt

Oregon Giant:  Seeds are gray-white with black markings.  So perhaps the main color gene is p^gis   rather than P. Likely other genes would be V for the dark black color markings, and t for the partial color trait. No browns or greens or reds, so g,b, and [c r].  Markings more apparent on immature seeds, so perhaps J.

Proposed genotype for Oregon Giant: p^gisp^gisggbb[c r][c r]JJVVtt

Kentucky Wonder:   Brown seeds have main color gene P; perhaps color genes G and B make up the brown.  Immature seeds are pale, so j likely.  No black or violet, so v.  Solid seed color, so T.

Proposed genotype for Kentucky Wonder: PPGGBB[c r][c r]jjvvTT

Now we are ready to make some crosses!  First, consider Gramma Walters with Oregon Giant.  The recessive t/t genes mean that these crosses would also produce patterned seed, not solid black.  Hence, this can’t be the cross that made the black beans.

The Gramma Walters / Kentucky Wonder cross should look something like: PPGgBb[C r][c r]jjVvTt with all kinds of heterozygous genes since almost nothing is the same!  But if we look at the dominant genes, we see we have genes for several color genes, including dominant V which makes things black.  We also have T which produces self-colored – non-patterned seed coats.  That’s our black bean!  Mystery solved!

If I should plant those beans what should I get?  In the F2 there will be all kinds of combinations of the dominant and recessive pairs. Just consider the Tt with  Tt possibilities.  Namely, TT  Tt  Tt and tt would produce 1/4 patterned beans, and 3/4 solid color beans.  Two thirds of the solid beans would still carry the recessive t pattern-color gene.  It works the same way for Vv so we would expect 3/4 black or violet beans and 1/4 lightly colored beans.  The other color genes for the Kentucky Wonder and Gramma Walters are probably all different.  No sign of greens or browns in the Gramma Walters, and no sign of red in Kentucky Wonder, so for the quarter of the beans that are light-colored, we might expect just about any color you can imagine to show up!

If I plant 100 of my F1 black beans, I can expect about 75 plants that produce solid color, and of those 75 about 56 will produce black or dark-colored beans. Of those 56 only about 18 will be homozygous in VV and produce black beans reliably in future generations. Of those 18, only about 6 plants will be homozygous in TT, and only produce non-patterned seed in future generation.

Note how much easier it is to select for a recessive trait you wish to propagate. Any of the patterned beans will have the tt homozygous recessive genes, as will all of the self pollinated offspring.  A single selection breeds true with a recessive trait in a self-pollinator.  If instead we are trying to get rid of the t patterned-color trait, which is what I would have to do to get a true black bean, then I have to remove the patterned-color beans each generation to weed out the homozygous tt genes as they show up, but I can’t do anything about the Tt carriers since I don’t know which ones those are.  If you do the math, after you remove the ones showing the homozygous recessive trait, you will have 1/3 of the remaining seed homozygous in the dominant trait in the F2.  After selecting in the F3 you will have 60% true seed; 78% true seed after F4; 88% true after F5; and 94% true seed after the sixth generation of selection to remove the obvious recessive genes.  You may never get a 100% pure dominant trait since those recessive genes can hide for a long time!

We’ve only considered bean seed coat color, but much more important for a new bean variety would be characteristics such as taste, disease resistance, earliness of harvest, size of pods, yield, etc.  These traits are controlled by hundreds of genes, all of which need to be selected for desired qualities.  The parents could easily be representatives of the Andean and Mesoamerican races, so in some sense, the hybrid is the mixing of long-lost relatives.  The plants in the F2 generation will generate many new combinations for traits from these diverse parents.  Clearly the selection at the F2 generation for the traits we want is most crucial.  I could just as easily have as a goal a bean with the dry-bean qualities of Gramma Walters with pod shape of the Kentucky Wonder, and I would have started with the same F1 cross with the same black beans.  Of all the possible combinations of genes possible between the two lines, I am only sampling the hundred or so possibilities that happen to be in the seeds I sow.

So should I plant those seeds and see what comes?

Here are a few references for those of you who need to know more.

Mark J. Bassett and Phil McClean,  A Brief Review of the Genetics of Partly Colored Seed Coats in Common Bean

P. E. McClean, R .K. Lee, C. Otto, P. Gepts, and M. J. Bassett, Molecular and Phenotypic Mapping of Genes Controlling Seed Coat Pattern and Color in Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.)

James D. Kelly, The Story of Bean Breeding in the US.

Mystery from the Tunnel of Beans

This story starts a few years ago when I picked up a few pretty bean seeds at a seed swap.  They were colorful oval beans with maroon and white splotches and were labeled as pole “pea beans.”  Three years ago I planted the seeds and discovered a bean with a very vigorous habit, happily bounding the poles and climbing into a nearby tree to produce copious medium-sized crescent-shaped pods.  As a fresh bean they are nothing special, but as a dry bean they excel, producing a bountiful crop that dry on the vine before the rains come, and a tasty bean as well.

Curious about their pedigree, I looked up “pea bean” on the internet and discovered a similar shaped red and white been popular in the UK that went by that name.  I also discovered that these “pea beans” were considered to belong to the species Phaseolus aegypticus rather than  our common beans Phaseolus vulgaris.  My beans didn’t look exactly like the UK pea beans, but I was willing to accept that they were similar enough to provide them with the aegypticus label at last year’s seed swap.  However, Andrew Still of Adaptive Seeds was skeptical that they were really a different species.  I had used these beans as a “separator” between my Oregon Giant and Kentucky Wonder pole beans, since if they were a different species they might reduce crossing between the other beans from which I save seed.  Beans are self pollinators, setting seed before the flowers even open fully.  They are resistant to crossing, but determined insect pollinators can sometimes produce crosses anyway, and I have a lot of bees in the yard.

The tunnel of beans has worked out quite well this year.  With the recent spate of fine weather, the beans were getting nice and crispy, so I was picking the dry ones a couple of days ago.  These beans really are quite pretty.  Mostly they are cream-colored mottled with maroon splotches, but sometimes they are reversed and are mostly maroon.  Usually the dark ones are all in a pod, but sometimes, as in one in the picture, there are both colors in the same pod. (click on the pictures for a better look).  On the vine, the beans that have yet to dry are fat little pods with a pronounced crescent shape.

I made a more determined effort to identify them recently, and I learned a few things.  First, the Wikipedia page for the “pea bean” had disappeared with this explanation. (1) There’s no source which confirms that ”Phaseolus aegypticus” is a valid botanical name. (2) What evidence there is suggests that the ‘pea bean’ is a cultivar of ”P. vulgaris.”  It looks like Andrew was right.

So I was back to hunting for dry pole beans that looked like mine.  I’ve come to the conclusion that what I have is most likely a variety called Gramma Walters, considered an excellent pole dry bean for this area.  Another variety with  similar characteristics is the Stortino Di Trento Marbled Anellino Pole Bean.  The Anellino Italian varieties are noted for their crescent-shaped pods. My suspicion is that the Gramma Walters developed her bean from the Italian varieties.

You may think that the mystery is solved now that we have named the mysterious beans, but it is just beginning.  What should I find when picking the dry beans, but a beautiful bunch of black beans. 

The beans pictured all came from one plant in the midst of the planting of Gramma Walters beans.  I certainly don’t remember planting any black beans!  These are likely the product of a cross with either the Kentucky Wonder or Oregon Giant beans that I had in the same row last year.  So how do you get black beans from a combination of Gramma Walters with, I suspect, Kentucky Wonder?   There’s the mystery!  Besides appearing to be a beautiful and productive black bean, the pods were all completely dry, a good 10 to 20 days earlier than the others.  This is a good trait for a dry bean!  Should I grow these out and see what happens next?

Bean seeds are the fertilized embryos for the next plant generation, and they are also the product of the mother plant.  To understand what is happening with bean seed color, we first have to realize that the seed coat is entirely the product of the maternal genes, even though the contained embryo includes the genes from both the ovum and pollen.  Hence, seeds of a crossed pod will appear the same as that of normally self pollinated pods.

The prospect of trying to grow out a new variety is exciting, but also got me thinking about the genetics of natural inbreeders.  Beans happily pollinate themselves, so they quickly develop a highly homozygous genetic composition after a few generations of inbreeding.   When you cross two bean varieties, you are making the classic F1 hybrid, where all of the offspring of the cross should look fairly similar, since they all get approximately the same genes from each parent line.  So, if my black beans were from the Gramma Walters / Kentucky Wonder cross, I should be able to replicate pretty much the same thing again by hand pollinating the immature flowers before self pollination happens.  That’s one experiment I can try, to see if my understanding is correct, and if I can indeed replicate this event.

The black beans, which are the hybrids, must be heterogeneous in many traits, since the parents are so different in appearance, and they have genes from each parent.  These self pollinated beans will have many random combinations of the heterogeneous pairs, so they will produce the F2 generation with a large degree of genetic variation from plant to plant.  If I plant the black beans, I should get everything from Gramma Walters to Kentucky Wonder and everything in between in the progeny.  There might be a few black beans in there as well that I could select for the next generation and would come a bit truer to the parent.  The path might be a long one to get my black bean to come true enough to call it a new variety.

For the home seed-saver, this line of thought brings up an interesting conclusion.  The real problem for maintaining varietal purity is with contamination that goes undetected in the F1 and ends up contaminating the seed, especially in the F2.  Hence, a distinct seed color change is a good thing if we want to avoid contamination (since it is easy to remove black seeds from red ones).  If you were growing beans where you couldn’t easily tell the crosses apart in the F1 seed, those seeds could result in a hidden impurity in the saved seed with much less obvious ways to cull it out.