Post by macmex on Nov 6, 2014 6:42:16 GMT -6
Original Source: Mrs. Sherry Hill, Fayetteville, Arkansas
Written by George McLaughlin Jr.
When I was a child and teenager my parents took me and my brothers on annual vacations. Often, we would camp our way across a given region. One summer, we camped our way almost all the way across the U.S.A. and back. I remember stopping in tourist gift shops, in places like the Great Smokey Mountains, looking to bring home a memento, something unique to that area, of quality, which I would use and treasure in the future. What I found in almost every gift shop, all over the country was... the same silly, flimsy plaques and novelty items, most with labels which read “made in Japan.” It was only as a young adult and a blossoming seed saver, in the early 80s, that I found that for which I longed: heirloom seeds and plants. I started with a tomato from my father, some beans from my wife's grandparents and two sweet potato varieties discovered in the Warsaw Indiana Farmers Market. Over the years I have added to my collection. Over the years, out of necessity, I have had to greatly slow down on accessions. It's hard to keep up! But the Woods Mountain Crazy Bean has found a permanent home in my garden.
In 2009 Mrs Sherry Hill started a thread on the Gardenweb Beans and Legumes forum (http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/legumes/) asking if anyone could identify her family's heirloom bean. Two years later she came on again. Her screen name was Mawma. This was the first contact practically any seed saver had with this variety. Due to illnesses in the family, it took until 2011 for her to distribute seed.
Her grandmother, named Mary Mae Walker, raised her family on this bean, back in the 1930s. She called them creasebacks. At some point Sherry's grandmother lost her seed when their barn burned. They went many years without it. Then, in the early seventies, Sherry's mother (Jean Daniels {Walker}) worked with someone who gave her some seed. The co-worker called them “Italian beans.” When the family grew them out, the grandmother recognized it as the very same bean she and the family had lost. Sherry and her family obtained their seed in 1974 or 1975. Her grandmother passed away in 1977.
Mrs. Hill named this bean. It is called “Woods Mountain...” as Mary Mae Walker lived on Woods Mountain and Jean Daniels was born there. Woods Mountain is an actual summit, North of Clarksville, Arkanasas, in Johnson County. It is off of Hwy. 21 N. “Crazy Bean” is the second half of the name. It fits! As one grows and works with this bean, they often find themselves muttering, as they discover new and seemingly vast caches of beans, “This is crazy!”
Woods Mountain Crazy Bean is a bush bean. But it is a most unique bush bean. It is extra robust and extremely stocky. The first time I grew it, my observation was, that it looked like a pole bean which had been squashed down into a bush, a truncated pole bean. This bean will occasionally throw a non twining branch.. But it really is a bush,. Still, it is a very robust bush. Some who grow these space their plants at a foot. I find it hard to do when I'm planting those little seeds. But the truth of the matter is that this bush bean will fill up a square foot of space. Each plant will produce as much as some pole beans. Woods Mountain Crazy Bean has very dense foliage, which may aid making it so heat tolerant. The foliage typically hides the pods. One of the most common comments about this bean is something along the line of: “I didn't think it had any beans on it. But when I pushed the leaves aside, I found that the plants were loaded!”
The flowers on Woods Mountain Crazy Bean are violet in color. Its pods are green, but as they mature they usually show some purple streaking. The pods are about 5” long and mature to be about the thickness of two pencils. The pods have heavy strings, which are removed like zippers. When the pods are quite mature and strung they will often fall apart, in halves, during cooking. This mix of green beans and “shellies” is quite tasty and hails back to an earlier day, in many parts of our country, when the term “string beans” meant a meatier dish than what most people know today. One can pick the pods much earlier, and they are stringless. The mature seed is beige with black speckles, not unlike a pinto bean. Some seed have inverse color, being more black than beige.
Woods Mountain Crazy Bean Seed
This variety has three main distinctives. I've already mentioned its growth habit. Never, in my entire life, have I seen a bush been with such dense foliage and stocky form. Another distinctive is its extreme production. This variety just doesn't know when to stop! Finally, Woods Mountain Crazy Bean seems especially adapted to our hot Ozark summers. People in this part of the country typically plant their garden in April and harvest most of it by the middle of July. Many let the garden go after July, as the middle of the summer is usually so hot and dry that many garden cultivars simply die. From the middle of July until sometime around the end of August it gets so hot that trees often begin to drop their leaves. When cooler temperatures and rain returns, in September, some fruit trees will actually burst into bloom. They went dormant in the extreme heat and think it's spring when the rain and cooler temperatures return. Woods Mountain Crazy Bean has the ability to enter into a kind of stasis, appearing to be dead, and to revive when conditions are more favorable. Indeed, if conditions are favorable, it simply never stops flowering and putting on more pods, not even when one is picking dry seed from the plants. The variety has no “shut off button.” Because of these traits it is exceptionally useful for gardening in our region.
Here's a picture of production from just one plant.
In 2014 we received our first killing freeze very early in the morning of November 1. The temperature dropped to 26 F. at my home and remained there until well after dawn. Friday afternoon and evening, October 31, my wife and I worked like madmen, trying to pick every bean and tomato we could, to save them from the coming freeze. I threw several blankets over a smaller patch of Woods Mountain Crazy Beans. There was an icy quality to the wind as the sun set. Once it was dark we went inside to eat. We were deeply chilled. Just before bed time I thought about going back out, wearing a head lamp. I realized that I had not looked at the the larger, older planting of Woods Mountain Crazy Beans. I didn't really feel like going back out into the cold and dark. But I did want to save more seed. So, out I went. The plants looked ragged. Many had lost their topmost leaves to grasshoppers. I got down on my hands and knees and started sifting through the plants in their wide row. I was amazed! I kept finding beans, at every stage, from tiny new snaps to dry pods. They just kept coming and coming! I followed the wide row to where it seemed to end, in mounds of sweet potato vines. But as I picked and threw back the vines, I kept finding MORE BEANS! Part of me really wanted to finish. I was cold and tired. Part of me was overjoyed with the production. As I picked and picked on into the night I muttered to myself .. “This is crazy!”