Johnny's and others have a purple asparagus bean that is beautiful and productive. The color doesn't fade when the "snaps" are blanched, so they are a fun and colorful addition to the freezer. Last year I grew a green variety and I think I like the purples better from a culinary point of view. These guys need a high trellis, as high as you can reach to pick. The vines will double back on themselves and keep producting on a 7-8 foot trellis. You eat it as a mature legume, either mature green or dried, but I really like Peking Black (Vigna) from Southern Exposure. It's a half-runner that will twine to about 4 feet when given sticks or other support. Last year I grew it up widely spaced sudex and they formed a beautiful partnership.

Technically, my summer temps don't reach 115 degrees often, but my rose garden is located in a heat pit that traps the heat between the slope at the back of my property and the house. It's easy to tell that it is hotter in the rose garden than at the top of the slope. It's cooler up there ... lol. My summer temps officially range from the high 90s to around 110 degrees for months, BUT (and this is important) my night temps cool off down to the low 70s, which gives the rose the opportunity to pull moisture up to the top of the plant. Reviewing the roses in the garden, I have found that the roses with thick petal substance and dense foliage do best in high temps. I also prune differently than I was taught when I started my rose life. I don't take off all of the twiggy growth as long as it can create foliage. In my experience the extra foliage helps the plant to be more heat tolerant. I also am home a lot and spray down the roses daily during the period of high heat. The plants can absorb moisture through their leaves. This practice also controls spider mites. Few rose books or websites even mention petal substance, but if you read the patents on HMF, you can often find information about the thickness of the foliage of the bloom. Smiles, Lyn

The year started with Favas and peas. Windsor favas did much better than last year. The edible pea pods I had got mixed, but we loved the Oregon trail shelling peas. They are supposed to be a climber but seemed bush in our garden. I guess a short pole? We are planting lots more of them (already have!). Next were the runner beans. This year I planted some of the white one, sweet white runners and runner canelinis. They produced enough green snaps to make it again into the pickle jar, and we got two pots of chili out of the seeds. The sweet white runners were inter-planted with chayotes and they are giving us a fall crop! They are full of white flowers so we expect more as the weather cools down a little. The brown runners (red scarlet runners) seem dead, but I know they are dormant and the root it still OK. P. vulgaris were not sufficiently represented this year, will do more next spring. The black valentines did great (bush) and produced a nice crop of green snaps in a hurry. The Lousiana purple pods gave us quite a few beans, they tasted OK but not great, still looking for a good variety of purple. Tried Cherokee wax bush beans and they were OK, not as good as Gold of Bacau, so far still my favorite gold snap. The Fortex failed miserably and did not even give us any beans. Second year in a row, so we are done with Fortex. I tried a few Emerite, got enough for some seed, not many beans. I planted a few late Gold of Bacau, not sure if they will make it before frost. They should, since we rarely get frost before late December. Next year I need to plant a lot more common beans. Tennesee cutshorts sound very appealing, I also want to try my unnamed Catalan beans and the monjetes del ganxet. Oh, how could I forget?! The soissont verts gave us a nice crop and we are still in love with them. Plant even more of them next year. I tried a few soybeans and they did not do well. I suppose I crowded them. We also tried yard long beans, got a few and realized we are not so wild about the flavor, whatever they do to them at Chinese restaurants makes them taste great, can't reproduce it at home though. We also got some pink eye purple hulls, they are moping, limping along and so far have produced one flower and two beans. Next year we will not do cow peas at all and instead try our luck with limas (Gigandes and black jungle butter beans) Full cycle and we are back to favas and peas. Sowed more Windsor, Sansimonia (Italian) and some favas I brought from Spain. Don't ask me the variety name, I will call them Catalan favas. I planted more Oregon trail shelling peas, and got myself a pisoli rampicante from Grow Italian that is a snow pea with the flavor of a sugar snap. Can't wait! I also planted a few chickpeas (forget the variety but it is the one sold by Grow italian) Some have sprouted already. I am only growing a few, just to check out the plant cycle and see what it does and how we like them.

Pat, We eat all we can while it is fresh. We freeze, we dehydrate, we can. We give away fresh produce (not as much as you'd think, though, because I like canning it) to family and friends. We send lots of produce to work with our son, who is a professional firefighter. Since they work 24 hours shifts, they cook a lot of their meals while working and always appreciate a few fresh veggies (plus, it helps them stretch their food budget). Last year I filled up 3 freezers, the root cellar (aka the tornado shelter), and the "jelly closet" (which originally started out as a coat closet, but is much better used for food storage of home-preserved food). I canned a little over 700 jars, but that's because it was the best fruit year ever and I had 350 lbs. of plums and peaches to process in a fairly short period of time. Most years it is more like 200 or 300 or 400 jars. What does a small family do with all those jars of jams, jellies, salsas and hot peppers? We eat some of it, but give away a lot more than we eat. My DH is a police officer and every year at Christmas he gives gifts of our home-grown and home-preserved goodies to about 80 or 90 co-workers at the PD. We give the same sort of gifts to our friends, including all the members of our vounteer fire dept, and to family members. We donate jars of jellies, jams, salsa and candied jalapenos to local fundraisers for some of our county's volunteer fire departments and oter causes. I think that last year, each gift bag at Christmas had 1 jar each of jelly, jam, peppers and salsa. Of course, the ones for family members had more---maybe 8 jars. I figure if I am going to put all the time into the veggie garden, I want it to be as productive as possible. So, of course, I'm happiest with big harvests. However, in some years you have to be happy with any harvest at all and this is one of those years. We love eating fresh food from our garden and appreciate the fact that we know how it was raised and that it wasn't sprayed with a lot of pesticides. Now that we have become so used to eating from our own garden, it would be hard to go back to eating only grocery store produce because the quality of the fresh grocery store produce just is not the same as that of what we grow. I garden biointensively with very close spacing so I can get the most out of the space I have. I do a lot of succession planting. My favorite way to do succession planting is to start the succession crop indoors 7-12 days before I expect to plant it into the ground. I often start beans and peas in in 3-oz. bathroom cups filled with potting soil. I cut a big "X" in the bottom of each cup for drainage, and for the roots to grow down through later after I transplant them into the ground. I use the paper cups as plantable pots to reduce transplant shock. I germinate the seeds indoors where I can control the temps and light, them immediately move the seedlings outdoors to grow in natural light as soon as they germinate. (This eliminates the need to harden them off.) At the time I'm removing a finished crop like, let's say, the mid-season corn that will be coming out of the bed in a few days, I'll harvest the corn in the morning and replant that bed the same day. In the afternoon I'll likely use my little Mantis cultivator to work the existing mulch into the soil in the early afternoon. In the cool evening hours, I'll transplant the started bean or pea plants, cups and all, into the soil and water it in. Then I'll mulch it. So, if you were at my house early that morning, you might see a raised bed of ready-to-harvest corn. Then, if you came by at 8 o'clock that evening, the corn will have been picked and processed, the bed cleaned out, the corn stalks on the compost pile, and rows of small southern pea or bush bean plants freshly transplanted into the former corn bed. It surprises our friends and neighbors sometimes when they stop by on a day I've harvested/replanted. I'll get a funny look and a question like "weren't your corn plants there this morning...?). Doing a quick turnaround like that speeds up the harvest cycle. For example, in beds from which I harvested onions the first week in June, I'm already harvesting okra from transplants that went into the bed the same day the onions came out. The watermelon plants I put into the ground that day have melons that are the size of softballs, and those plants have been in the ground for only about 5 or 6 weeks. I have a lot of trouble with good seed germination in early spring when soil temps are too cold or soil is too wet or when the cutworms are too active. That's one reason I prefer transplants as much as possible. It is a lot more work and a lot more time-consuming, but you get more consistent germination, and there's not any gaps in a row caused by poor germination since I don't transplant any cups with ungerminated seeds. For something like southern peas that germinate easily in warm soil, it isn't so much that I get better germination in paper cups indoors, but that I get a head start by growing the plants in cups. If I start seeds of southern peas in cups and transplant them into the ground about 10-14 days after I first planted the seeds in the cups, then those plants will produce 1.5 to 2 weeks earlier than plants that would be direct-seeded on the same day. I've grown the crops here so long in that mnner, that it is easy for me to look at the spring plantings and know when it is time to start seed of the follow-on crop. I even start seeds in cups sometimes of veggies that don't like to be transplanted, like carrots. Since a lot of things don't like to be transplanted, I just plant the cups and all right into the ground. The paper cups break down pretty quickly. If every succession crop I put into the ground is already a week or two "old" when I plant it, I get a faster harvest, which allows me to get the next succession crop into the ground quickly too....and so it goes until I run out of space, water, or time. Fall beans are the best! It is nice to be picking them in October when the temperatures are milder. We just called them "October beans" when I was a kid because that's when you picked them. I probably was a teenager before I figured out that "October beans" was a general name for all fall-harvested beans and not a specific variety of bean like "Lazy Housewife" or "McCasland". The older I get the more I like pole beans because it isn't fun bending over to pick bush beans, but I always plant bush beans in spring for the early harvest, and pole beans for fall, and more bush beans for fall in a good rainfall year. I'm not sure if I'll plant fall bush beans or not. In order for me to do that, I want to see some good rain falling first. About the only succession plantings I'm making this summer are additional sowings of lima beans, southern peas (I'm growing pinkeye purplehull, crowder, zipper and cream types), okra and squash. They can take the heat when nothing else can. I'd never, ever, ever sell my veggies at a Farmer's Market. I've been to Farmer's Markets, I've witnessed idiot customers trying to bargain with the grower/seller and convince them to sell their fresh veggies for next to nothing. and it is a pet peeve of mine. It is unreasonable for consumers to expect sellers at the Farmer's Markets to sell their produce for lower prices than they'd pay at Wal-Mart and it just infuriates me. Knowing all the blood, sweat and tears, and time and effort, and worry and sleepless nights on a "frost watch" that go into growing fresh produce, I feel like the growers at Farmer's Markets ought to be able to sell their produce for more, not less, than the price local grocery stores charge. Raising veggies well is labor-intensive and time-consuming and to me it implies a certain lack of respect for the farmer's or market grower's time and effort to try to bargain them down to a "cheap" price. To me, their work and the quality of their produce is deserving of the price they ask, and sometimes I think they sell too cheaply because they feel they have to in order to compete. So, it will be a cold day in Oklahoma in July before you'll see me selling at a Farmer's Market. A friend of a friend of ours sold produce at a local farmer's market for several years and finally gave it up to get "a real job" with a guaranteed income and I can't say I blame her one bit. Our produce is too precious to us to sell it to unappreciative people for whom the only thing that matters is the price they pay. Dawn