LeMay

Pole habit dry bean. Cooked beans are smooth and slightly sweet. Jim (donor) usually cooks the beans by breaking and stringing them and cooking them in a 2-6 quart sauce pan. He adds fat (butter, bacon, or other oil) at a ratio of 1 tablespoon per quart of beans. He adds enough water to almost cover the beans and tosses in some new potatoes along with salt and pepper to taste. Cover and cook over medium heat until most of the water is gone. Both the pod and the bean has a great texture and flavor. Strongly vining plants have white flowers. Pods mature from green to pale yellow to almost white when seeds are mature. Pods measure 7.2-8.9" long and 0.6-0.9 wide. Pods contain 8 seeds. Medium sized oval seeds are white. When grown at Heritage Farm in 2017 this planting was moderately productive and mid to late maturing. Donated to SSE in 2015 by Jim Price and his mother, Thelma Price, of Nashville, Tennessee. This pole bean has been in Jim's family for 12 generations and was brought to the United States by Peter LeMay, a French Huguenot, in the early 1700s. Growing up, Jim remembered his grandmother Gertrude May Denny LeMay serving canned or fresh beans at nearly every holiday or celebration meal. Gertrude likely started growing the variety when she married Charles LeMay in 1905 in Illinois. The variety was grown by several of Gertrude and Charles' 10 children, but as they had more disposable income, gardening and canning became less of a necessity. While the variety has been in the LeMay family for centuries, it was almost lost with Jim's mother's generation. The last time Jim's uncle Charles "Pete" Evans LeMay grew the bean, he put a pound of seeds in the freezer, where they remained until several years after his death. Pete's children found the 20 year old seeds in his freezer and gave the seeds to Jim, which he passed on to 3 young farmers in Nashville. 2 years later, Jim received 1.5 pounds of seeds to pass out at the LeMay family reunion. In 2015, Jim grew this variety with his 96 year old mother and said "Today our lives are pulled in a hundred directions and with the abundance of food sources other than personal gardens, we’re less likely to be good stewards as our forefathers were. Hopefully it won’t be our generation to lose this gene line completely. That’s where you at Seed Savers play such an important role.” SSE Accession # 132869