Bean Damage

After quite a long period of little sun, lots of rain, and cool temperatures, I went to harvest my Golden Gate yellow beans. Very unhappy to see the amount of damage in the beans themselves. The plants look fine, in fact, robust. But the beans are showing signs of slug damage plus something else. 

The curling of the pods was to be expected. This is a pole variety that I accidentally planted in the bush bean bed. So it didn't get trellised. If grown on a trellis, the pods would have been straighter. But it's the brown marks that concern me. 

And I've never seen the brown discoloration along the top "seam" of the pods before. 

So what's the problem? Wrong variety for the weather conditions? Too wet? Too cold? Not enough sun? Some sort of disease? Just not a good variety for this farm? 

I'm ending up with 80% loss. That's right. Only 20% of the beans are sellable. 

I still have about a pound of seed for sowing. I think I'll wait until late spring to plant it .......and along a trellis this time! (oops) So I'll see how this bean performs in warmer, sunnier, and hopefully drier conditions before I give up on it. By the way, I cooked up the damaged beans for the chickens and they smelled delicious. At least this one has good flavor going for it. Plus the pods are very low fiber, thus they are quite tender when cooked.