After the success of planting coffee in the Bolivar garden, we are hopeful for this next project that is coming.

As an assignment for agriculture, each student has to work on writing a monograph about a plant we were interested in. In my case, I chose to write about Phaseolus vulgaris, which is the common bean. Even though it is one of “the most basic” plants you can choose, the common bean piques my interest because knowing about it is very nostalgic to me. It brings back memories of when I used to plant beans in my bathroom after learning how to do so in my old school: I would put them inside a plastic cup, with wet cotton balls. Those were obviously not the best conditions for planting beans, but they would still grow beautifully. 

Coming back from the memory lane, after telling Dr. Waliszewski that I wanted to write about the common bean, he suggested that I took this idea even further. He had the amazing idea of contacting CIAT to get some bean samples and experiment planting their varieties in our garden.

Some selected seeds from the genetic seed bank at CIAT

I first went to the genetic bank webpage hosted by CIAT https://genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/language.do?collection=bean and looked through 37987 varieties of bean and chose them, based on which were fitting to where we were planting them, but also which appealed to me and looked pretty . I really wanted to see those pink bean pods

G3023 Phaseolus vulgaris from Quezaltepeque, Chiquimula, Guatamela. Un ejemplo de las cascaras rosadas yo eligí. (Foto International Center for Tropical Agriculture. All rights reserved. 2019©)

 

After a few weeks we received the samples and are expecting to plant them sometime soon after preparing the materials and soil.

Anyone can visit the CIAT weblink given above and ask for beans to plant.