Dry Beans — Open questions

⚠️ Core project principle: “Unknown” is preferable to fabricated certainty (§6.2). This is the living list of what we do not yet know. Each question can become an original experiment (docs/methodology/experiments.md).

Open questions (all unanswered today for dry beans)

1. Manual shelling/processing: how long does it take to shell a few kg of fully dry bush-bean pods by hand, and what is the loss? Candidate EX (see processing.md). Needs experiment.
2. Small-plot yield: realistic g/m² of dry edible beans per m² on a home plot, after shelling losses.
3. Nitrogen fixation without inoculant: do garden-grown beans fix useful N with resident soil rhizobia, or is inoculation needed in a new bed? Candidate EX. Needs experiment.
4. Photoperiod × habit at garden latitudes: do day-length-sensitive bean types flower/ripen in time in temperate and mid-latitude gardens?
5. Shatter on delaying harvest: pod shatter loss if delayed, and the practical harvest window, at home scale.
6. Bean-weevil exclusion: how reliably do airtight/exclusion containers keep out the Mexican bean weevil at room temperature.
7. Home storage viability: how long do room-temperature-stored bean seeds remain viable for resowing (and how long is food quality maintained).
8. Mexico frijol practice: confirmed bush-frijol growing/storage practice in Mexican smallholder/food-garden systems (see sources gap).

Candidate experiments (ordered by human-scale value)

• E1: Bench-shell + clean benchmark (time + loss per kg).
• E2: Beans-without-inoculum nodule check (new bed).
• E3: Small-plot yield trial (bush beans; density gate).

How a question is retired

Gains a tagged answer (source S-#### / experiment EX-####) and, when appropriate, a value in data/crops/dry-beans.yaml.

Confirmed gaps (from the 2026-08 sweep)

1. Manual shelling/threshing at human scale — academic set thin; needs practical/grower + experiments.
2. Home-garden exact yields (g/m², kg per plant) — papers report kg/ha; units conversion / original experiment needed.
3. Home hard-to-cook & dry-down at household scale — covered as grain/garden science; household adaptation needed.
4. Mexico home-garden frijol practice — presence yes, small-scale practice thin.