WITSA: THE LOST BEAN (Almost)

Many of you will have remembered a few years back, Witsa beans were impossible to find. Fortunately, ordinary seed savers were responsible for ensuring that this variety did not die out. For many, many years Witsa seed was grown by a single farmer, who sold this seed to all of the mainstream seed companies in South Africa. Livingseeds never stocked the seed, as the seed was always freely available. The farmer passed away a number of years back, and all of a sudden there was no Witsa seed supply.
We put a call out to a few of our customers that we knew had seed and they graciously sent us seed. We collected seed from 5 different sources, checked for purity and did a grow-out over a 3 year period.
Livingseeds now has PLENTY of seed of this unique South African heirloom bean.

Witsa History:
Witsa was developed in 1951 by the Agricultural Research Institute (pre ARC days) from a cross between the St Louis Perfection and Green Savage. Green Savage being the market leader in the previous 10 years. The breeding was entrusted to a number of people over quite a few years, so it's quite difficult to say who it was developed by. The breeding was started under Mr Olsen and finished with a Mr T Joubert. Witsa is a superb, high production bean that will produce very well especially in water stressed environments, a great benefit is that it is also blight resistant, especially in early plantings.