Problems with Runner Beans
The Importance of the UC System to Agriculture and to Home Owners
I suggest you take a sample of your bean plants (one or two entire plants) and also some soil separately wrapped to your nearest local Department of Agriculture or UC office, which may be the one in Riverside, California.
Thank you so much for that helpful information. We will contact UC Riverside and see if they can recommend someone to take a look at our samples that we will prepare per Pat Nolan’s instructions. Perhaps UCR may even do it as they have a large agriculture department.
Thanks for letting me know you will do this and for your reply. I am very grateful! Please report back and tell me what you learn. This would be helpful for me and for many other gardeners.
The address of the Agricultural Experiment Station & Cooperative Extension is the University of California, Riverside 900 University Ave. Riverside, CA 92521. UCRiverside is one of the “land-grant colleges” that are part of our nationwide system of county agricultural advisors. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States Congress in some of the wisest legislation ever passed (in my opinion), dramatically advanced the practice of agriculture in the USA by founding land-grant colleges, creating agricultural experiment stations, and founding the Cooperative Extension Service to deliver the latest agricultural knowledge to farmers. (After the Second World War, I learned that this system partly explains why agriculture advanced so rapidly in the USA in contrast, for example, to USSR, which though it was trying to modernize agriculture, had no organized way to either study agricultural science or to spread the knowledge to farmers on farms. Thus the communal farms founded in Russia often made tragic mistakes, simply because the best techniques of farming were unknown or understood.)
Later, in the United States, the addition of Advisors in Urban Horticulture and Home Economics extended help to home owners. Eventually the Master Gardeners spread that help even further. In California, the whole University of California system is part of the land-grant system, with UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and UC Riverside comprising the most important parts.