As an experiment, i dug up last years runner beans and potted on the root. Early spring most of the plants sprang into life, so I tried an experiment, to compare newly sowed plants to 2nd year plants. The 2nd year plants started flowering then fruiting first but the fresh seed sowed batch fruited for a longer period of time, the variety of both was Moonlight. I think It's worth doing each year with seeds getting more and more expensive and postage prices from US to Europe. I'm thinking or trying this with other beans, i'm growing soya, butter beans, lima beans and bolotti beans, generally bean seeds that are diffificult to get hold of. anyone else tried this?
2nd year runner beans
I just save seed from my red runner beans and plant them year after year. To the best of my knowledge red runner beans are open polinated so produce true to form.
Maybe farmer Dill will come on and tell us about Runner beans
Red flowered runner beans never set fruit here in Spain - Andalucia, after 6 years of trying, the only runner bean I have had success with is white flowered Moonlight variety. I was wondering if anyone else had any second year harvests from other types of beans.
I have only one single red runner bean plant this year that my daughter started from saved seed. It has been blooming for nearly 3 months and hasn't set a single bean. Since I've never had trouble getting beans before, I can draw some conclusions. 1) They are not self-pollinating, you have to have more than one plant in bloom. 2) they need a pollinator to transfer the pollen. Hummingbirds are one of the main pollinators here. What ever pollinators there are in Spain must be attracted to white, but not red.
Scarlet Runner beans will not produce beans in hot weather. They flower, but abort the baby beans. Once September arrives, they will produce edible beans here in NC 7b.
I've not grown other red flowered runner beans, so don't know about them.
Although I've not saved Fortex runner bean seed, they do *volunteer* as do Black Turtle beans.