My family has grown this variety of long bean since 1974 when a Chinese friend gave it to my parents as a wedding gift (he said it was a Chinese tradition). Every summer we've enjoyed the beans it produces, but it produces a lot of pods so over time we ended up saving quite a lot of seeds from missed beans. At this time I am the only person in my family growing it, though I plan to plant some at my parent's new home in May. :)

I have 7 sandwich bags of seed in my freezer, which is how we always saved this seed. Three of the bags came from my parents' old home and 4 were grown at my place. Unfortunately my grandmother (ruler of the garden) and my parents were not big on careful labeling and I only discovered it a few years ago. The bags I grew since 2008 are labeled, with notes, leaving three bags of unknown age and viability.

I took about 100 seed from each baggie to test for germination, though when I did the calculation at the end of my test it seems I either under or over counted seeds from 2 of the bags.

What I did: Moistened three paper towels. Put 100 seeds on each towel and folded the sides over. Labeled three freezer bags 1, 2, and 3 and put the correct seeds/towel in each. I began checking on Day 2 (Tuesday 2-3-15) and recording and removing those which were sprouting.

End results:

-Bag one had 78% germination and began as the darkest of the seed batches. My assumption based on the very dark seed coat is that these are the oldest.
-Bag two had 84% germination and may have a pound of seed. Since basically all of the seed sprouted (remember I undercounted) I rounded this up to 100% germination. I was very anxious that these be viable.
-Bag three had 66% germination and was very disappointing.

All seeds swelled significantly from the moist paper towels. Also, all of them returned to their original light reddish brown color. If I hadn't labeled them there would have been no way to say which had ben the dark batch.

My plan is to grow out bag 3 and share (pass off very forcefully) bags one and two with family and friends. :)

Next week 15 year old Bloody Butcher corn seeds.