Skip to main content

I Planted a Mystery Bean

Mystery Beans with Red Flowers
 Sometime last year, I bought some beans I had never seen before. They were quite large. I also loved the taste. 

Because I had never seen them before, I decided to plant some of them. 

Well, the beans survived the rainy season and they are now flowering with bright red flowers. I have never seen beans with red flowers before. After googling around for a bit, I learned that they are called scarlet runner beans. 

I have only seen white, pink, and purple flowers on beans. So the red flowers were a beautiful surprise. I absolutely love them and I look forward to the podding and harvesting stages. 

There is another batch of mystery bean that I also want to plant. These are also large, but they are plain brown in color. I'm probably going to plant them after harvesting something else. Because right now I have three bean fields, a maize field, an onion field, a garlic field, and a tomato field. 

Last year, I had a problem with pests and I realized that it was because of planting the same variety of beans over and over, and also replanting the same crop on the same field without rotating with a different crop. 

So now I'm switching things up. I will remove all the beans from a bean plot and plant a different crop to break the cycles. I will also 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My First Carrot Seedbeds

I made my first carrot seed bed and it feels so good to see my first carrot shoots.  Germination rates were low because I covered the seedbed for too long and I think some of the shoots died before they could push through.  Next time I will only cover the seedbed for one week and thereafter I will water it at least once a week until I get my carrots.  But for now, I am just happy to see my first carrot shoots. Within the next few months, I will be eating my home grown carrots.  I am not adding any manure because I have been told that carrots do not respond well to manure. You can use NPK and wood ashes, though. 

My very First Managu Seedbed

Making my first managu seedbed was easy. The seeds were from Simlaw Seeds and I bought the smallest sachet.   The germination rates were very high. Someone warned me that the commercial seeds are not the best but I like the results I have seen. I have used chicken manure in the seedbed because I have plenty of chicken manure in store.   This will not be an easy crop to maintain because the rainy season is over now and I will be relying on irrigation to keep the garden going.  But one thing that I want to do is to keep the garden planted all the time, even during the rainy season. So I will proceed with the transplanting , even though I will be managing my expectations.  The risk now is that even with irrigation, I may not get the results that I want because of excess heat. I will mitigate that risk by watering every week and mulching as much as possible.  This particular variety is simply called Black Nightshade . Simlaw has another variety t...

Chicken Dilemma

Of late I've been plagued by a dilemma. I'm torn between keeping improved chickens and pure kienyeji chickens.  Kienyeji's are slow growing. They are ready to butcher in six months, but they also hatch their own eggs and brood them. So they are self propagating. You don't have to buy new stock.  The improved kienyeji are fast growing but they do not hatch their own chicks or brood them. So you have to keep buying new stock.  I now have a barnyard mix of one kienyeji hen, two improved hens, and one improved rooster. I thought this would be an ideal solution because the two improved hens supply us with eggs continuously and the kienyeji one can be the mother.  The problem is that the improved jogoo gets too big for the kienyeji hen. She has no feathers on her back from the big rooster stepping on her constantly. The last rooster I had grew all the way to 3.2kg and I butchered it because it was too big and still growing.  Since I got rid of the offending rooster, I...