Well, now I'm questioning my supposition, Reefisher. Usually, powdery mildew is a late season problem in my garden. Many plants get it but squash & melons seem to be the most susceptible. The peas from an April planting are long gone by late Summer/early Autumn but the vines have some mildew by the time they are pulled in July. Planting Oregon SugarPod in August doesn't really allow for pod development here - therefore, we are just growing them for the tendrils. They don't get tall enuf before frosts begin (usually after mid-September) to even require a trellis. Older bean plants also get mildew but the ground for early peas usually provides a home for a July planting of green beans. Seems to work without much trouble altho' if I run very late into the month - frost may kill the beans before I get a crop. If your March crop got mildew in May, I think you've just found that this variety prefers Autumn growing conditions. Maybe, we can "tear a page from your garden notebook" and plant Ho Lan Dow late. I don't see a "VPs003" behind the name but Stokes sells Ho Lan Dow - which means I don't really have an excuse for not giving 'em a try over all these years of pea-pickin'. I've got to say that your temps in December look to be warmer than ours were in late September but . . . you never can tell. Steve

Your dwarf gray sugar snow peas will have purple blossoms...that's the easy one for me to tell early on. The others you list should all be white flowered. The pods on the Sugar Pod 2 Snow Peas will be flat for quite awhile and the seeds will show though as small bumps. Pick them before the seeds grow large and the pods become rounder since the pods will be tough by then. The Burpeeana Early Peas will have pods that do not stay flat for long and do not show small seeds through the pod. Of course you want to leave this growing until the pods fill with good sized peas. I'd have trouble telling the Sugar Daddy Snaps from the Burpeeana's but since both are picked with rounded pods you can try them and see which has the fibrous pod.....BINGO...that's the Burpeeana and the other should be the tender snap pea, Sugar Daddy. In my garden, heights have not always agreed with the reported info. And some keep growing aller for a longer time and the height when flowering begins changes alot.

Georgia, I agree with the statement "you may not be able to find anyone who has even heard of it in another state"! I had to spend 2 years in Alabama with a job transfer, 18 years ago. I am from SC. They had never heard of Hercules! I had my saved seed and gave a few out to the gardeners at work. Planted the rest. I took some to work in my crockpot and told them to help themselves at lunch time. They went wild over them! The guys that I gave seed to kept the seed from theirs for replanting, because they liked them so much. One guy called me about 5 years later to tell me He had been giving seeds to his neighbors and friends, and everyone was crazy about them. I am now a legend in Andalusia Alabama! LOL I wanted to call him for some seed after I lost all of mine due to drought and deer, but I couldn't find his phone number!

Gayle, I haven't had a lot of time to look through the seed catalogs yet.....too much holiday stuff going on.....but I have ordered a couple of tomato varieties from Burpee to add to my extensive collection of tomato seeds. (You can never have too many!) I do like Marianna's Peace quite a lot but it seems to taste better when grown in hotter, drier years. I don't grow snow peas here, mostly because we usually warm up really early here in southern Oklahoma and the weather seems to go from 'too hot' to 'too cold' overnight. I tend to prefer the spiney okra here because our large deer population LOVES okra, and the spines are my only hope for getting any okra for the humans at all. (All I want for Christmas is an 8' tall garden fence to replace my 4' tall fence!) However, Clemson Spineless is our favorite spineless okra. It is an oldie but a goodie. Baker Creek (www.rareseeds.com) offers a variety of heirloom okras also. The ONLY way I know to keep bermuda out of the asparagus bed is to absolutely remove ALL the bermuda, every single tiny shred of stolon, before planting and then remain hyper-vigilant forever after! Heavy, heavy mulching helps as does digging out any and every bit of bermuda grass as soon as it appears in the bed. Keeping a very heavily mulched pathway about 2' wide on all sides of the asparagus also helps.....the farther away you can keep the bermuda grass from the bed, the better! You have to keep the bermuda grass out of the aspagus bed because once the bermuda invades the bed, there is not much you can do except hand-dig it out of the bed, and that often damages the asparagus crowns and root system. Also, be sure to keep nearby bermuda from going to seed and sending those seeds into the asparagus bed to sprout. It was a combination of too cool, too rainy, too cloudy, etc. for many crops last year, and mostly likely, that was true of your squash and eggplants. Mine didn't perform well until late July to early August, and only then because the rains stopped here at that point and it did get hot and dry (finally!) in our part of the state. I'm hoping for hotter, drier weather this year so the veggie garden will thrive and produce like crazy. After Christmas, I hope to do some serious planning for the spring veggie garden. Dawn