Little Green Beans

These are the beginnings of the bean crop this year.  I call it a crop but really it's a whole 10 or so plants with a few beans each.  Enough to make a side dish from once they are big enough but that's about it.

We will have enough though to save some of the seeds for next year's garden.  Seed saving is the only way to get crops year after year, whether you do it yourself or buy from seed companies that only do seed saving.

Doing it yourself though has one distinct advantage over buying it year after year from a seed company.  You know how the plant is going to react where you live and there will always be small variations to a plant.  What grew is the best plant from the seeds you planted.  The beans, in this case, that grew are a snapshot of those plants.  Anything that made those specific plants grow that maybe made them a fraction better than the plants you thinned out or that didn't grow so well is preserved and passed on to next year's crop.  If you do this for long enough you will start to have a hybrid and something that, although it resembles the original plants, is not the plants you started with.  They will, hopefully,  be better.  They also might get cross pollinated from a nearby garden and come up with a whole different plant.  This happens a lot with commercial crops.  One plant will cross with another and the result isn't always what a farmer wanted.  Thus saving seeds can be a tricky matter.

Several of the seeds we have planted are from produce from the store.  This also can be fairly random since some produce is pollinated by a more fertile plant even though the fruit from that plant may not be as desirable.  Apples for instance are often cross pollinated with crabapples because they put off more pollen and help other apple trees produce better.  The fruit from the desired trees is good but the seeds may well be a cross between say a honeycrisp and crabapple.

Some things you don't want to cross.  Dill and fennel for instance will produce a plant that doesn't taste like either and doesn't smell all that good.