Just curious if anyone has tried digging up the tuber, stire it over winter and replant after heavy frost next year? (Kind of like gladiolas or dahlias) Where i am the tubers would obviously not make it through winter,(zone 6) but it might allow the plant to set some pods for me before it gets hot…
Any thoughts on this?
It might be worth trying if the ground freezes over winter. Or perhaps bury the tuber below the freeze zone, mulch heavily then remove the mulch once the thaw begins in spring.
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I collected a dozen varieties of runner beans in all colors to try to select the most heat-resistant variety this year. Unfortunately, they all grew wonderfully with no bean set this summer until the weather turned in September, when they all simultaneously started setting. So, that was a bust. Can’t do selection or selective crossing when there’s no variability in the characteristic sought.
They were all planted close to one another, so it will be interesting to see if there’s variance in the beans coloration from the parents. If I create a landrace of beans of widely-varying appearance, will they eventually settle out on some dominant color characteristic?
I have a secondary planting of the largest varieties of runner beans I could find. Very much looking forward to seeing what that yielded, but I made no attempt to intentionally cross them, so I’ll probably just save the largest beans out of the set and start it over next year, together with any new large ones I acquire.
I thought this one told the story well: lots of dropped flowers, followed by sudden bean set when it cooled.
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I notice heat is a big issue for runner beans where I live in Florida. They stop producing pods and then die out completely.
My suspicion is that if you select for taste, productivity, vigor, etc., you will probably eventually eliminate a lot of the diversity in the color of the seeds, because you’re favoring whatever color happens to be best suited to your climate. If you want to keep a lot of different colors around all the time, you will probably want to preferentially plant the ones that can survive in your climate but not produce abundant seeds.
Most of us probably care more about highest food production and favorite tastes, but Joseph Lofthouse does that because his goal is to create diverse populations that are meant to be shared to other climates, so he wants to keep in all genetic diversity possible. What doesn’t work great for him may be perfect for the next person who receives his seeds.
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I’m seriously tempted to try starting runner beans in February or March next year, under a mini greenhouse with milk jugs full of water to hold in some heat, and see if I can get them to flower at the right time of year to set pods that way. It would be really cool if that worked. I wouldn’t mind having them as a spring crop.
I have two runner bean plants flowering outside right now (yay!), and the red flowers are beautiful. I haven’t seen any signs of pods being set yet, and our first frost is probably going to happen this weekend, so, uh . . . I don’t know if they’re going to produce anything . . . (wry laugh). But I do want to keep trying!
It may be worth trying to plant some around the base of fruits trees next year in order to get shade (and therefore cooler temperatures), as well. Plus they could use the tree as a trellis, which would be okay. Maybe that’d help them set pods in my summer heat.
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Actually, come to think of it, for people who have summers that are too hot to get many seeds, maybe we should be digging up the roots and seeing if we can eat the tuberous root as food? (It’s edible and is supposed to taste good.) Then it wouldn’t matter that there aren’t enough beans to eat; they may still be a viable food crop. As long as you got a few seeds to plant next year, that may be a sustainable root crop, essentially.
Ha ha, actually, even if you couldn’t manage to get seeds, maybe the tubers could be stored indoors to plant the next year. They are perennials in a warm enough climate, after all. As long as you could get seeds every few years, and thus could keep planting new genotypes to try to locally adapt them, that may be a viable way to landrace them in a climate where they’re usually uncooperative about making seeds.
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Very true! I love that you have such a positive attitude about them, despite their lack of productivity for you. 
Ive been growing Runner Beans for seeds to eat for the last 4 years, which is strange in Ireland as they are normally grown for the green beans, but I remembered my grandmother putting them in stews in the East of England sometime in the 1960s so as a lover of dried beans I started putting varieties together.
I created 2 populations one of the coloured beans(Painted Lady, Yardlong and a Guatemalan Landrace called Buton ) and the other of the white varieties we would call “Butter Beans”.
The white beans grown were Jacks and White Lady and a variety that I bought from a Organic shop that was from China, I then went onto find out we had other white beans in Europe. Piekny Jas(Handsome Johnny) from southern Poland and the amazing Greek Gigantia from well, Greece!
I am getting some great colour and shapes starting to happen, with Black beans in long pods (6+seeds per pod)turning up alot this year.
I tried to send pics but im not that brilliant at the tech, so if anyone knows the icon I have to push to load pics?
Keep up the great work family…Kevin D
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Sounds like you’re getting some crosses to happen. Excellent. We grow them all together, white seeded as well as coloured ones. I have a patch of just Painted Lady as I love how the beans cook. We’re selecting for perenniality. We sow a patch. The following year we see what comes back from tubers and use seeds from these plants to resow the patch. We’ve only been at it for two years so early days yet. This current season (we’re in the Southern Hemisphere) we’re in drought so we won’t be doing a lot with runners.
How hardy are they normally? I don’t know whether I should consider mulching heavily and seeing whether any of these many varieties come back next year, or just lift them all to see how much tuber is there and whether they can be overwintered in a protected spot. 
Hi Kevin. Sounds interesting! I’ve come across a small group of Frisian seed savers from the north of Holland. They’re selling traditional varieties and landraces.
Here’s the pdf file , hope you can sée them.
Friesland is a deeply agricultural region at the coast, quite north, could be a lot like yours.
Also interesting for @malterod @JesseI @mtttthwww_vdp @isabelle @ThomasPicard @Justin @WojciechG
They sell in local shops mainly and one online shops, but i couldn’t find them on there. I’ve written to them.
A client of mine gave me some of their seeds, and he’s willing to bring them to France so i could post them to any folk interested.
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If your ground freezes over winter I don’t think the tubers would survive. The ones I’ve seen aren’t all that big and they are not deep. I’ve not tried it but I do wonder whether the tubers would be deep if the seed was planted deep. They’re large seeds so I don’t think they’d have any trouble pushing up a plant from depth.
You could also bury the bottom foot or so of the stem in deep mulch before winter. See if that helps the roots keep enough warmth to survive. Worth a try!
Actually, if you planted them in a swale to begin with (a bad idea in a climate prone to floods; a great idea in a climate prone to drought), that would make it easy to mulch a large portion of the plant up to the level of the berms.
yep, interested to enrich my genetics with any contribution ! thank you Hugo !
(can’t read duch…)
I heard from @Soeren that he got a runner bean to overwinter this year in Denmark. Unfortunately, he can’t realistically grow them as perennials in his place because the voles love to eat them. I think a runner bean landrace with perennial tendencies in our Northern climate would be really interesting to see.
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update on my crop : the year was very difficult for them, because of a cold and wet july , gasteropods hunger, and competition with weeds (this last point was deliberate but I guess it was a little too much for this year. So some of then did not even climb up the beautifull willow treillis I had weaved for them !
I still got a harvest a few hundred grams , with a good diversity, similar to what I planted. I may have lost a few varieties, but that’s ok #survivalofthefittest .
the picture shows the range of shapes and colours I got.
Unfortunately, I inadvertently poured all my seeds into the bush beans pot of this year, grrr. I don’t mind having bush beans in my runners , they just dont climb, but runners in the bush is some trouble . So I spend some time trying to sort them, based on the samples I had of both groups. It is very interesting to get to know and recognize them closely. Not sure it will be enough. Anyone can confirm that the way they germinate allows us to differentiate between runners and bush ? I intedned to try direct-sowing next year but if necessary I can have them germinate in pots and wait until I can see which is what .
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That would be really interesting! I think @RayS technique of planting a patch and favoring seeds from the winter survivors sounds like a great and easy to use technique. We will be looking for survivors of our first year runner plantings in the spring.
Interesting to hear about the voles. We have had several incidents of sudden growth stoppage or failure with our runners that seemed to me like tuber damage.
About voles - - I’ve never seen them, but there are tunnels all over the property. I’ve seen a large turnip disappear into one before. And sudden stress or death of young trees, other plants tugged down and their roots and lower stem chewed off, or vanished completely. This seems likely to be a problem we will need to navigate as well.
I wonder if you could surround runners with cold hardy plants that smell or taste bad to voles. Or other nonviolent, inexpensive, and low-effort means to discourage them eating them (during the winter or any other time).
@malterod is right, I had a single runner bean survive in the ground. It sprouted a few weeks after I transplanted my planned runner beans, with two stems. It grew well, flowered and set pods, like the annuals. But suddenly the plant wilted. I have save the few seeds, and will send them to @malterod for him to grow out. My garden is shaded, lying east of a mixed wood. I didn’t expect any overwintring runnerbeans, so I was quite surprised, as it started growing. Even more, as my garden is fully populated with the european watervoles. I see the youngsters several times every year, as the leave their mums, and desperately search a new home.
I’m pretty sure my plant is the french cultivar ‘Orteil de Precheur’. The french gardener sending me the seeds wrote, that this cultivar survive the winters in Alsace, temperatures down to -15°C. But only once did it survive in my garden, probably missed by a vole.
An other selecting pressure in my garden is the roedeers. I let them roam freely. They eat all bean leaves, but my runner beans outgrow them and can set seeds up where the deer don’t reach. I have grown Tarahumara Tekomari, but it is just a bit slower, and never grow out of reach, as the deer comes by before, and chew it down.
Garden beans also cannot outgrow the nibling deers.
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