Just letting everybody know that I found some Pink Half-Runner Bean seeds. Thanks for everybody that contacted me - I greatly appreciate it.

The name is about as good a description as there is. It is bean plant that puts out a profusion of short runners, normally less then three feet. Most folks grow them as bush beans altho they grow as a tangled mess. There are a dozen or more varieties available. Flavor is more like a pole bean.

I grew Red Peanut, here in OK, two seasons ago. It made a compact bush with twining, 3' runners. Upon seeing how they twined I gave them some support, but they did not climb. Perhaps they would have if provided support earlier. I once received seed of a family heirloom bean, from the very family who had raised it for about 40 years. They always grew it as a half runner. But when I gave it support it easily reached 10-12 feet. I greatly prefer to grow it as a pole bean, myself. Penny Rile cowpea is noted for being of less vigorous, vining growth than many other varieties. When I give it support it tops 10'. I grow it both ways. George Tahlequah, OK

Growth habit of half runners is genetically determined. For example, Striped Bunch will only climb 5 feet for me. They are not more productive when trellised, but there are fewer damaged beans than if they sprawl and they are easier to harvest. The problem with sprawling is that it leaves many of the beans in contact with soil. In a dry climate, that is not a major problem, but in a humid climate, most beans touching soil will be damaged by insects and/or diseases. Half-runner beans are one of the original four types cultivated by Amerindians when white settlers first arrived. Here are the four types: Type 1 - determinate bush (typical of the bush snap and shell beans) Type 2 - Upright short vine (half-runner) Type 3 - Indeterminate sprawling (many western varieties are in this group) Type 4 - Indeterminate strong climber (most pole beans are in this group) Half runners are not hybrids, in fact, there are to my knowledge no hybrid beans on the market today. All commercial beans are therefore open pollinated which means you can save seed to your heart's content. There is however a fairly consistent rate of cross-pollination in beans. If two compatible varieties of bean are planted close together, about 1 seed in 100 to 1 in 1000 will be crossed. To illustrate this, I deliberately interplanted Fortex pole beans with a highly disease and heat tolerant line from Colombia. When I grew the resulting seed, I got one hybrid plant out of about 300 seed sown. Bees did the work of making the cross for me. There are 5 recognized species in Phaseolus: P. Acutifolius (tepary bean), P. Coccineus (runner bean), P. Lunatus (lima beans), P. Vulgaris (common bush/pole/sprawling beans), and P. Polyanthus (A rare type grown mostly in central America). As a general rule, species do not intercross with each other though crosses can often be made via embryo rescue. There are some very useful genes in one of the species but not in the others. This has resulted in several efforts to make crosses such as between Tepary and Vulgaris to bring disease tolerance into Vulgaris. There are 5 subtypes of P. Vulgaris (common bean) each of which demonstrates partial incompatibility with the other types. Light Red Kidney beans for example don't play particularly well with the common snap pole beans such as Fortex. Do a bit of delving and there will be a few articles talking about these 5 types and the genetic restrictions to crossing between them. Now we can talk about White Half-runner beans. The original White Half-runners are thought to have been developed somewhere in the Appalachian mountains. They were commonly grown from Alabama through Tennessee into North Carolina, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Unfortunately, they were so successful that they attracted a great deal of effort to "improve" them by adding disease and pest tolerance. The result was to compromise the culinary traits of the original beans making them far less palatable. This caused several bean growers to go on a quest for seed of the original half-runners. Bill Best at http://www.heirlooms.org/ came up with NT Half-runner which appears to be closest to the original beans.