Haricot beans

[andi clevely]

After carelessly eating our seed reserve of haricot beans and then whingeing in GYO articles about their disappearance from seed catalogues, I feel I should put the record straight. 'Brown Dutch' seeds are available once more from this year's Organic Gardening Catalogue. The best haricot ever, gorgeous with a nice organic bacon hock in Boston Baked Beans!

Having said that, in desperation I selected a number of brownish beans from a Tesco 'Stew Pack' of mixed beans and grew them last year. Not bad at all! Now to grow both kinds for comparison (ever the researcher!), though they probably won't cross-fertilise to produce a superior hybrid - French beans tend to self-pollinate before the flowers fully open, and deliberate crossing is a bit fiddly.

Do explore supermarket shelves for novel seeds - ever tried growing wild rice, for example, just for fun?
best wishes, Andi

[Flummery]

Many of us do just this!
I have a lovely haricot that I grew out from a random cross. I had 10 seeds of Soldier dwarf french bean from the HSL and one grew tall and produced red pods with black beans when dried. I grew these F1s and got a fair old range of beans from it, most of them dwarf. The ones I liked I saved and grew on for another year. The one that came true is a white bean, bigger than the supernmarket 'haricots'. This is going to be my main dwarf dried bean this year. We are all researchers here! Welcome to the Grapevine.

[zazen999]

Seconded. When I go abroad I often come home with soup mix, and sow half of it and see what I get.