So sad about Congo. Boy, I really wanted to try that melon. The garden angels must have known that I didn't have the space anyway. Maybe next year! You don't have tomato Indian stripe by chance?

Are there any southern peas that grow on poles? I'm trying to figure out a place for mine. Or, some that can tolerate some shade. I have a large area that only gets about 4 hours of afternoon sun. We are in the Phoenix area. I'd like to find some sort of legume to put in this area for the summer.

Helen, Sometimes I use them for soil improvement within the garden and other times I just pull the plants and throw them on the compost pile. Last year I left the plants in the ground and rototilled them into the soil in early winter. What I do depends on whether I have plans to plant a succession crop of something else in their space once they're through producing. I do like to use field peas in newly-broken ground purely as soil improvement but for that purpose I use varieties that I don't find especially wonderful for eating. Sometimes I'll break new ground and grow one of the Texas field peas in it for the first year or two to improve the soil before I plant anything else into that area. I even did that when we moved here---planting field peas in future shrub beds for two years before we planted the shrubs there, and the soil still wasn't nearly as improved as I'd hoped. Canokie, I don't grow Rattlesnake as a dry bean. I grow it as a snap or even as a shell bean, but not as a dry bean. Dry beans take a while longer to mature and dry down on the plants and, since you're dealing with limited space, leaving the pods on the plants longer means a lower harvest over time because plants that are maturing beans are slower to form more new beans. Rattlesnake is a very heat-tolerant, drought-tolerant and productive bean but one reason it is so productive is that you are continually harvesting beans and it is continually setting more beans. Once you start leaving the beans on the plants longer for dry beans, it takes longer for the plant to make more, so you harvest fewer overall. About the only time I leave any beans to dry is at the end of the season when the freezer is full and we've eaten so many snap beans that we're ready for a break from them. Having said that, Rattlesnake would outproduce most pole southern peas over the course of the season, I think. It takes a lot of beans to give you one pound of dry beans and that's the main reason I don't grow any bean primarily as a dry bean when you can walk into a store and buy 1 bag of dry beans for so little money. It just isn't cost-effective for me to improve the soil, buy the seeds, plant the beans, water them, weed them, harvest them, dry them and shell them when I can buy a pound of dry beans for less than a dollar at the grocery store. It makes me feel like I put $20 or $30 worth of material, water and work time into producing a $1.00 bag of dry beans. Other people likely don't share my feelings about raising dry beans, and maybe I wouldn't feel that way if I had a 5-acre garden and lots of space for dry beans, but I don't have room in my current garden to raise dry beans or a desire to do so. To be honest, when I have grown dry beans, put them in storage in the pantry and then pulled them out later to cook, they didn't taste any different to me than dry beans bought at the store and cooked at home. And, if I was only going to grow one snap pole bean variety, it wouldn't be Rattlesnake unless I knew in advance that we were going to have weather just like we experienced in the summer of 2011. In fact, Rattlesnake might not even make the Top Five list of what I'd grow. If I could grow only one, I'd likely pick Garafal Oro or Musica, not that I'd ever have enough discipline to plant only one variety. Dawn

So I guess they do sell them dried. I can remember my grandmother sitting out on the front porch, shelling them from the big apron pocket on her lap, and cooking them fresh, but don't remember ever seeing dried ones, only canned or frozen. Great experiement. I'm glad it worked, except that it's making me hungry for some ... :-)