Well, I have grown tall peas up on twine like Donnabaskets and Camp10, and my parents re-use chicken wire and T-posts every year. Both of those work fine. This year I'm going to plant around tomato cages made of re-enforcing wire since a bunch of them came with the new house and it seems like less work. Though I think I might need to be sure to get the cages in good so I don't have any troubles in the wind we tend to get in spring. For short peas I've tried not staking (floppy mess and a lot of the pea pods get ruined), brushy twigs, a bush bean support (a sort of grow-through gridabout 8 inches high), and short stakes and twine. All of those methods except the first worked fine but I ended up coming to the conclusion that I prefer working with tall peas more when it comes to harvest time. Cheers!

Most likely you won't have much success if you are talking zone 6 East Coat. Slugs/snails are numerous towards the end of the season and they love tender lettuce plants. Initially, the weather is still too hot now which delays the growth stage of lettuce and then probably too cool later. You are much better off if you grow true late/winter greens like spinach, corn lettuce, miners lettuce, also Arugula.

Based on information from Dr. Wilbert Hetterscheid, the top Amorphophallus expert in the world, in Amorphophallus species the "corm" is the stem tissue which is encased in the small bud at the top of the tuber full of stored food. That bud grows upward into a divided leaf and outward into roots with the tuber beneath. Although many authors use the terms bulb, corm and tuber interchangeably the only term that is truly applicable to an aroid is tuber. There was recent discussion on the International Aroid Society forum Aroid l regarding this subject and several botanists chimed in to agree the words bulb and corm should not be used. The stem is the central axis of the plant, not the support of a leaf. The support of the divided leaf on an Amorphophallus and all aroids is called the petiole. The plant actually uses the food om the tuber during the summer and is virtually always smaller at the end of the season provided it is happy. I have seen my Amorphophallus titanum tuber so tiny just after it goes dormant I thought it was about to die but the next year it has grown large again during dormancy. A corm is an underground stem to which the above-ground parts of the plant may die back in the dormant season. It often stores starch and when it regrows foliage will come from the top and roots from the base like a typical stem but there are no true examples of a corm in the aroid family. A tuber is a strongly condensed stem as well as an underground structure which is almost entirely a starch storage organ. It wouldn't be unnatural for your tubers to be smaller at the end of the growing season since the plant has been using the stored food. Unless you live in an extremely cold climate Amorphophallus konjac can easily stay in the ground year round. I leave at least 40 tubers in the ground all the time in zone 6b and they reproduce themselves every year. I've traded mail with growers as far north as Philadelphia that do the same.

Thanks everyone for your advice! I went to the library yesterday and found a fairly good book on Mesembs/Succulents indicating where certain species live, when they get rainfall/fog and how much. The major difference is their growing season- summer or winter. The other thing is growers in CA are growing their lithops completely different than growers in the UK/N Europe (for obvious reasons). My understanding is that growers in CA can mimic their natural growing environment, due to fantastic light year round and fairly warm temps. With the UK/N. European growers many seem to push for winter dormancy regardless due to cooler temps and lack of light. There is no clear cut answer, which complicates it further :/. Will have to spend a bit more time doing research on the types Im interested in growing and seeing how I can get them to do well in my environment.