Indian Hannah Beans 2018 Growing report

(Apologies for some of the pictures.  I did the best I could.)

  A little history... Back in 2014 I ordered some Indian Hannah beans. My son thought they sounded cool, and I wanted to get him into gardening. His interest waned pretty quickly, but they were different beans than I was used to seeing, so of course I saved seed... and promptly tucked them away and didn’t grow them the next year. At the time I was losing sunlight in my garden due to the treeline behind us, and there wasn’t any more room to spread out. When our neighbor sold us the lot next door last fall, my garden moved and grew, and so I pulled the Indian Hannah beans out during the winter. I found three variants:

The color was close enough to the original beans that at first I thought I might have variation based on soil differences. (Jacob’s Cattle bean appears to lose its white mottling in some soils. When we grew it on the farm in heavy clay, it turned solid red as did some other white and red spotted beans.) I went back and read the listing from the SSE Yearbook, and the original source of the seed was listed as Eastern Nature Conservancy (Ea4), which is, of course, out of business. Thanks to Internet Archive, I was able to find their website as it was years ago, and in the listing for this bean it mentioned "Not completely stabilized."  

Armed with that info (and more space), I planted it this year to see what happened. (Spoiler alert -- if you have ever seen Russ Crow’s A Bean Collector’s Window website, you know where this is going. If you haven’t seen it, it’s awesome.  You'll never look at beans the same way again.)

I planted Type 1 (T1) and Type 2 (T2) in my back garden (the old one, losing the sun), and the “looks like original” (hereafter "Original") seed went up front in the new garden. T1 and T2 were in first and sprouted quickly, then slowed down in growth. The beans from both T1 and T2 were more of a Roma-style pod, both about 5”-6” in length. T1 tasted good as a green bean. T2 was not so good-tasting, and some pods had red streaking like a horticultural bean. Both plants had white flowers that turned cream-colored as they died.

"Original" took longer to sprout, but once they were up they grew quickly. They were a later bean than both T1 and T2, which is consistent with what I remember about the first time I grew them. "Original", however, had both white flowers and white flowers with pink blush. Pods were mixed, with some wider (not quite like a Roma bean.) Some of the wider pods had a horticultural bean marking (red streaks).

As for the beans....

  T1 produced pretty consistent beans of markings mottled with white, though there is color variation between tan and a more greyish brown. Some large, some smaller, some more cutshort than others. I suppose I could separate these into even more different types, but I’d go out of my flaming mind doing so. It was hard enough for me to separate the others with the light in my house. (Thank you, CNV.)

Type 2 gave 5 different types. Clockwise from bottom left: light tan with reddish-brown markings, dark tan with reddish-brown markings, dark and light tan with reddish markings and small patches of white, light tank with large patch of white, and medium tan and reddish markings with tiny splotch of white.

As for "Original".... hold your hat and enjoy the ride!

I separated 5 types out of "Original" (or 8, depending on how you look at it):

~those most like I started with

~ those patterned with white, of which there were 3 types: dark brown (one dark brown was half tan, another was solid brown with tan markings), tan with brownish markings, and greyish brown with brownish markings.

~ slightly larger and more rounded version of the original.

~Fawn-colored (or Gurnsey-colored, for those of us cow-minded) with no markings (one bean pod supplied beans with a white spot)

~And the biggest surprise of all -- purple and purplish! All the “solid” purple are in this picture, the patterned beans are purple-tinted.

So, are all of these from crossing, sports, or what? I’d have to say these are outcrosses.

In the first grow out of beans, where I had T1, T2, and “most like originals”, I know that any outcrossing wasn’t from my garden. In fact, Russ Crow on his site, in his “Outcrosses” page, shows similar beans to T1 and T2 (No Working Title - 40 and 43) . He had received Chocolate from the same source I received Indian Hannah from, around the same time.

I went through my records of what I grew that year for beans. Good records are a must when growing beans, and mine could be better, believe me, but in 2014 I grew a test group of Navy beans (from the Armada elevator), Lafayette, Indian Hannah, Odawa Indian, Blue Jay, and Great Lakes Special. All I can suspect is that the purple variant comes from Blue Jay; However, I had Blue Jay caged, trying to protect it from the critters that liked it so well they ate them all up on me! How that cross happened is beyond me, but I there isn’t another purplish blue bean which I have grown.  (On a side note, I grew out the rest of my original Great Lakes Special, and got a few dark purplish blue beans out of them.)

So where do I go from here? Since receiving these beans, Baker Creek has come up with the “true” Indian Hannah bean, which comes from William Woys Weaver’s collection (his grandfather collected it from the owners of the property that Hannah lived on).  So which bean is the bean?  Well, I'm not sure Eastern Nature Conservancy had it, especially with the "not completely stabilized" note from the defunct website.  That said, anything is possible (if you know the story of the "Unknown Pea of Washington Parish", you know what I mean.)

So where do I go from here?  Well, I rather like the small, cutshort, tan-marked, white, spotted beans (4 pictures above.) Then there are the purple ones. I’m curious to see what the solid purple give me if grown out. What fun is life if not some surprises thrown in?  Might be fun to grow some of them out, just to see what shows up.  We'll see.  That said, I will be carefully selecting any Indian Hannah (Ea4) I grow in order to try to settle down the variation.

edit on 25 November 2018:  I looked up some of the beans available from Eastern Nature Conservancy, and found that some of the markings/beans resemble Kahnawake Pole #2.  http://www.annapolisseeds.com/product-p/142.htm