As a string-bean, the White Marrow is of average quality: but, for shelling in the green state, it is surpassed by few, if any, of the garden varieties; and deserves more general cultivation. When ripe, it is remarkably farinaceous, of a delicate fleshy-white when properly cooked, and by many preferred to the Pea-bean.
In almost every section of the United States, as well as in the Canadas, it is largely cultivated for market; and is next in importance to the last named for commercial purposes.
In field-culture, it is planted in drills two feet apart; the seeds being dropped in groups, three or four together, a foot apart in the drills. Some plant in hills two and a half or three feet apart by eighteen inches in the opposite direction, seeding at the rate of forty-four quarts to the acre; and others plant in drills eighteen inches apart, dropping the seeds singly, six or eight inches from each other in the drills.
The yield varies from twenty to thirty bushels to the acre, though crops are recorded of nearly forty bushels.
Yellow-Eyed China.
Plant sixteen to eighteen inches high, more branched and of stronger habit than the Black or Red Eyed; flowers white; pods six inches long, nearly straight, pale-green while young, cream-white at maturity, and containing five or six seeds.
It is an early variety. When sown in May, or at the beginning of settled weather, the plants will blossom in six weeks, afford string-beans in seven weeks, pods for shelling in ten or eleven weeks, and ripen in ninety days, from the time of planting. From sowings made later in the season (the plants thereby receiving more directly the influence of summer weather), pods may be plucked for the table in about six weeks, and ripened beans in seventy-five days. Plantings for supplying the table with string-beans may be made until the last week in July.
The ripe beans are white, spotted and marked about the eye with rusty-yellow, oblong, inclining to kidney-shape, more flattened than those of the Red or Black Eyed, five-eighths of an inch long, and three-eighths of an inch in breadth: fifteen hundred and fifty are contained in a quart, and will plant two hundred feet of drill, or a hundred and fifty hills. The plants are large and spreading, and most productive when not grown too closely together.
The Yellow-eyed China is one of the most healthy, vigorous, and prolific of the Dwarf varieties; of good quality as a string-bean; and, in its ripened state, excellent for baking, or in whatever manner it may be cooked. It also ripens its seeds in great perfection; the crop being rarely affected by wet weather, or injured by blight or mildew.