French Gold (p. Vulgaris)

[rdback]

French Gold (p. Vulgaris) in Virginia – 2022

This is a new-to-me yellow pole bean that has produced surprisingly well, especially given this years' challenging weather conditions. It has been terribly hot (90+), humid (Heat index 100+), and little rain. Further, this variety has been attacked brutally by Mexican Bean Beatles. Regardless, this bean continues to grow, flower and set pods in an impressive fashion. Might just be a keeper.

Seed source was Renee's Garden. Here is their description:

French Gold

Pole Filet Beans

These hard-to-find, handsome yellow filet pole beans were originally bred by our favorite French seedmen for their domestic market. French Gold are true “haricot verts” beans: classically slim, round 7 to 9 inch pods with delicate, sweet flavor and a crispy snap that makes them especially choice eating. The heavy bearing, vigorous vines yield extra-fancy, juicy pods to enjoy in colorful summer meals over a long season of harvest.

We harvested our first batch the other day. Just over 4 pounds.

We blanched and froze some, but also fixed a pot. Very good tasting bean.

[woodeye]

Appears to be an outstanding pole bean, it might even do well here in OK, ya' never know. 
Thanks for the info and photos!

[june]

Oh, those look so good!  I just ordered some--or so I thought--then after I placed my order I looked again and the one I bought was called 'Gold Rush'.  Well, maybe they'll be good also!

[rdback]

I'm adding this photo, not to show the decimation Mexican Bean Beatles can do, but to show how well this bean set pods consistently, in spite of all the heat and drought issues we experienced this year here in Virginia. We have harvested several pounds of beans and have left the rest for seed, but if you look closely you can still see pods from the bottom of the trellis all the way to the top. This bean is prolific and certainly "heat tolerant". It just might do well for folks in OK, TX, etc.

[chrysanthemum]

I wrote a reply to this some time ago, and I must have failed to hit the proper button (again!) since it didn’t show up here.

The beans look great (despite the bean beetle damage). Thanks for posting the picture.

I wondered how big a plot you planted and how much you had to water during your dry times.

My mother lives over west of Charlottesville, and she’s been having a time with bean beetles this summer. The other day she attached a photo to her daily e-mail that showed her container of soapy water full of beetles and larvae she had picked from her pole beans. Yuck! I told her that I much prefer pictures of her produce. We have plenty of pests and difficulties down here in Texas, but thankfully I haven’t had infestations of bean beetles (yet). It’s apparently much more common in the east than in Texas.

[rdback]

chrysanthemum This year I'm growing about 100 row feet of beans - (4) 25' rows. I also decided to replace the soaker-hose with a drip system. I bought one of those complete "Starter" systems for garden rows that covered 100' - easy math for me lol. I think it has emitters every 6 inches with a drip rate of 1/2 gal/per hour. Don't hold me to that - that's based on memory, which isn't too good these days.

So, to answer your question - When it was hot and dry, I ran the drip system for 45 minutes every 2-3 days. With all these hit-or-miss thunderstorms this summer, we mostly got missed until the last 2-3 weeks. Then, we started getting "hit". I haven't run the drip since then, but I think the hot-n-dry is coming back shortly.

This is a photo of the newly-installed drip lines.

[woodeye]

rdback, Looks great. Question: Are the emitters that are in your irrigation system made into the tubing?

I have used drip irrigation in the past and still have some leftover that hasn't been used, but it is the style that uses emitters that have to be installed. A hole is punched in the tubing to space the emitters at whatever spacing I want. 

I am thinking about buying some tubing with the pre-installed emitters inside the tubing, in addition to using up the tubing and exterior emitters that I already have...

[rdback]

woodeye Yes, the emitters are built right into the drip-tape. This stuff is thin plastic that lays pretty flat when not under pressure. Cuts with a pair of scissors. Easy to work with. It connects via an adapter into the main line with one of those "punched holes" you're talking about.

The drip system you're describing is what I'm going to run to my raised beds. There's the main line, then you tap into it with flexible 1/4" hose with an emitter on the plant end. That will let me water plants that aren't in a straight line, like row crops are.

Hope that makes sense.

[woodeye]

rdback, Yes, that makes perfect sense to me. Thank you for the info.

I like both styles of drip irrigation. The tubing that I have came in a 200' roll and is pretty tough stuff. When the weather is cool I unroll it and leave it out in the sun to warm up so I can deal with it easier. I bought the tool to punch the holes in it for the emitters, there is also a cutter on the tool and it makes working with the tubing lots easier.

I haven't done the part you explained about running the 1/4" line off the bigger mainline, although I could if I wanted to. But like you said, it would be great for non row crop plants.

[chrysanthemum]

@rdback, thanks for the picture and the explanation.

What other kinds of beans are you growing in those 100 row feet? How many feet are devoted to French Gold?

I did some reading on Mexican Bean Beetle populations yesterday, and it seems that they don’t do well in drought, which explains why Texas doesn’t have as many of them as Virginia. I found a PDF of an article from about 1930 that discussed this with fancy math formulas for calculating the droughtiness of an area. I skimmed it, but I’m not going to link it here because I’m not sure of the security of the website. I guess there are some benefits to drought, though.

[rdback]

Aug 17, 2022 12:42:19 GMT -6 chrysanthemum said:

@rdback, thanks for the picture and the explanation.

What other kinds of beans are you growing in those 100 row feet? How many feet are devoted to French Gold?

I did some reading on Mexican Bean Beetle populations yesterday, and it seems that they don’t do well in drought, which explains why Texas doesn’t have as many of them as Virginia. I found a PDF of an article from about 1930 that discussed this with fancy math formulas for calculating the droughtiness of an area. I skimmed it, but I’m not going to link it here because I’m not sure of the security of the website. I guess there are some benefits to drought, though.

What other kinds of beans...well, let's see...there's cowpeas, snaps, runners and limas. They're all different species, so crossing amongst them isn't an issue. Now I do grow multiple varieties of each, except the limas. Lima beans are very promiscuous and will readily cross with another. I use varietal separation to prevent crossing, meaning no two varieties of the same species are planted next to each other. Hope that makes sense lol.

Anyway, this year I planted:

10 ft - Old Fashioned Whipporwill (cowpea)

10 ft - French Gold (snap)

10 ft - Kelvedon Marvel (runner)

20 ft - Worchester Indian Red (lima)

10 ft - Achievement (runner)

10 ft - Pink Tip Greasy (snap)

10 ft - Washday (cowpea)

(The other 20 ft is spacing between varieties)

Regarding the Mexican Bean Beetle...It sure felt like we were in a drought, especially during July. But, the humidity was sky high awful. Maybe that's all the moisture the little !@#$ need lol. Anyway, I don't use chemicals so I thought I try something different - Diatomaceous Earth (DE) in liquid form. I took 1/4C DE and mixed with 1 Gal of water, then sprayed the bean plants, shaking the sprayer regularly to keep it mixed. Within two hours I saw dozens of the little yellow nymphs laying on the ground, not moving. A few days later, all the nymphs were gone but, sadly, not the adult beetles. So today, I think I'm gonna hit them with a neem spray. We'll see if that helps.

 

[chrysanthemum]

Thanks, @rdback, for the lists and information. I just wrote a message and lost it in a way I don’t even understand. I’ll try again but perhaps will break things up into more than one post just in case.

When I was doing my reading about Mexican Bean Beetles, I also came across the statement that they seem to prefer wax bean varieties to other varieties. I guess that’s why your French Gold are so popular. Do you notice a difference between them and your other varieties, or is it all just equally awful?

Good luck with your neem. I’ve had some good success with it knocking back aphids and powdery mildew. I tend not to use it in the height of summer, though, for fear of burning the leaves. I do sprinkle DE powder at times, especially on the growing tips of okra when the fire ants are feasting. I’ve never mixed it with water, though. I should probably try that in my pump sprayer some time.

[chrysanthemum]

Okay, here’s my next installment.

About bean beetles and drought, humidity does definitely play into the matter. Our part of Texas is definitely much drier than Virginia was. I have no doubt that you experienced dry weather this summer; it just probably wasn’t dry enough to halt the bean beetle migration. They can also apparently fly really long distances when they are looking for less crowded conditions, so it’s possible that you were close enough to a non-dry area that they just came for your wonderful food buffet. My mother has been pretty dry, too (her spring fed pond is still down a couple of inches despite recent rains), and she’s having an awful time with bean beetles this year.

droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/MapArchive.aspx

There’s a drought map from early in July, and you can see a good chunk of Virginia was showing as abnormally dry at the time, but another chunk wasn’t, whereas Texas was pretty dry all over, with our chunk (kind of the middle part of the south central area if that makes any sense—if you drew a line over the bottom triangle, making the base at the top, we’d be about in the middle of that line) already in the exceptional drought category. This has been an awful gardening year for me, and I’ve about worn myself out watering with very little return so far, but hey, at least I think I can be pretty confident that my rather newly planted fall beans are going to be safe from bean beetles.

[chrysanthemum]

This will be my last installment, I think. I just wanted to mention that I spent some time looking about the various varieties you mentioned. Some I found wonderful articles with great descriptions; others it was more of just a mention or listing. I really enjoy seeing what other people are growing, though, so thanks for taking the time to share that. I’d love to ask a few questions about some, but I’m afraid it takes it away from French Gold. Sorry about that.

“Old Fashioned Whippoorwill”: is that that same as just plain “Whippoorwill” that I got from Southern Exposure and grew last year, or is it a different variety?

Your two runner beans: How are they doing for you in heat and drought? Did you have to start indoors to give them a head start early or delay planting to have a later crop? I’ve never grown runner beans. Actually, I don’t think I had even heard of them until I saw them in a friend’s garden in upstate New York about sixteen years ago. I looked into them at the time and concluded they’d be a difficult crop for my Virginia climate. (I also had a really tiny garden then—we were still in a rented townhouse with a postage stamp yard at the time.)

The Pink Tip Greasy looks interesting. I think I learned about Greasy beans on this very website probably, and I should probably look into growing some one of these years since I have at least one child who hates the fuzz on raw beans. It makes her mouth itch. Thankfully she still loves them sautéed or pickled, so we’ve been okay with our fuzzy beans. (That sounds like they’re kind of moldy or something. Yuck.)

The Worchester Indian Red looks like a beautiful lima. My father was particularly fond of lima beans, and I really enjoy them, too. I’ve never grown them because I only have so much space. Well, actually I tried my very first summer here, but they flopped.

It was fall when we first moved to Texas, and about a month after we moved, we visited a local farm park and talked to the woman in charge of the demonstration garden there about how to go about rebuilding our devastated soil. While we were talking another worker was pulling or cutting the lima bean vines and piling them in a wheelbarrow. He let my kids go through the vines and pull off handfuls of the dry pods. We took them home, shelled them, set some aside for seed, and boiled up the rest. They were a beautiful purple lima, and my kids really liked them. They helped me plant the seed the next year, and they did germinate and grow. I can’t remember if they ever got to the point of flowering or not, but they never set pods. It was probably due to extreme drought and a garden spot that got way too much sun, believe it or not. We moved the garden area the next year and began to put in our raised beds.

One more lima bean story. My husband and I don’t watch TV, but occasionally we’ll watch a movie or an episode of something from Amazon Prime. Over Christmas this year we watched a series that ended up being very strange and I wouldn’t really recommend, but it involved at times an apothecary shop with different herbal remedies. At one point the characters needed to brew a potion of sorts and were looking at a recipe in an old book. There was a scene where the apothecary was reading out the ingredients, and I don’t remember really anything about what the rest of them were, but I just burst out laughing when she read out “Phaseolus lunatus” from her list. My husband had no idea what was so funny until I explained what it was, as I’m sure the average viewer didn’t either.

[heavyhitterokra]

That was funny! Beans, beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat, the more ...  

Maybe, they really are magical after all.