This site is fantastic as are the people who post here. Maybe one day I'll be on the other side dispensing such great experience/knowledge. Followig Anney's advice I think I found was I was looking for, calico/red ripper were runners (said 6' vines) and the other were more bush like. The site I looked at had the same spacing for all varieties (2-3" space 12-36" row). Guess I'll just thin if the spacing is too tight. Ruthieg, plan on getting the green bean out today or tomorrow. Off topic but Austin's temps suppose to dip into the 40s this weekend. Should I be concerned for my peppers/toms I already have them in ground?

Dry beans and dry split peas have pretty much converted their sugar to starch and taste accordingly. Green Peas picked at the mature stage are sweet, tasty, and highly edible straight from the plant. Shell the green peas first, eat the sugar snap types as is, or stir fry snow peas. Cowpeas are a 'whole nother animal'. The best cowpeas are picked when the peas are just mature but before the pod has dried down. There is a unique maturity stage at which the peas can be readily shelled out of the still flexible pod. This stage can usually be recognized by a color change in the pod. White Whipporwill peas for example change from a darker green color to a pale cream to pale yellow. If the pod has turned straw colored, then the peas are over dry but still edible. They have to be cooked longer and the flavor is not as good. Please note that the difference between a green pod, a pod ready to shell, and a too dry pod is about 3 days so you MUST be out there picking cowpeas every day to get the very best flavor. Green snap beans would normally be picked when the beans are just sizing up before the beans develop in the pod. If you are like me and love greasy beans, we need to have a slightly different conversation. If you let the pods swell up with the beans inside and then pick them just as the pod changes color, they are referred to as 'shellies'. Do not eat the shucks, they will be too tough. The beans are sometimes referred to as 'horticultural beans' if they are deliberately grown to be eaten at this stage. There are also many varieties that are grown to be dried down on the vine, picked, and shelled. This would be the common Pinto, Navy, Great Northern, etc. The important thing to know is that each variety of bean has a specific use that it is best adapted for. There are very few beans that are truly multi-purpose. Turkey Craw is one that comes to mind that can be snapped, shelled, dried, and used for Leather Britches though there are trade offs for such diverse uses. What would you think of being able to pop beans like popcorn? Look up Nuna Beans if you are intrigued. DarJones

I grew them about a decade ago and they barely produced any harvest at all. By the time I shelled them and cooked them, we had barely enough for one meal, and that was from a long row of plants. It is not strictly Alderman's fault---it is our weather. Any and every variety of shelling pea I've ever grown here is just barely beginning to produce a decent yield when the true hot weather arrives and the pea plants go downhill fast and quit producing. I attempted to get a harvest from different varieties of shelling peas for three or four years here and finally just switched to growing only edible podded peas like Sugar Snap, Super Sugar Snap, Cascadia, etc. The edible podded peas produce a lot more actual food to eat since you are not shelling them and discarding the pods. The edible podded peas also go downhill fast once the summer heat arrives, but before they do that, they produce a huge harvest compared to the shelling peas. In a good year, I can harvest 30-45 lbs of edible podded peas. We eat all we can fresh and freeze the rest. That is so much more than we ever once got from shelling peas. I'm in southern OK and the edible podded peas usually produce throughout May and even into June in the years when the heat arrives at about the normal time. Shelling peas were so disappointing here. If you are in a part of OK that stays cold significantly longer than we do in southern OK you might get some harvest from Alderman, but I never found a shelling variety that was happy here.

Larry, My list was scrambled. I had too many purplehulls on my mind and merged two names together. It should have read: "...Pinkeye Purplehull, Six Week Purplehull, Pinkeye Purplehull BVR and Knuckle"." Paula, I have purplehulls and whippoorwills in the garden now. Tim suggested a pea sheller last year, but we like them harvested and shelled 'green' and it was my understanding that the shellers work better with dried peas than with fresh, 'green' ones. (I'd like to find out I'm wrong about that.) Today Tim also suggested we get a produce scale. I guess he's tired of seeing me weigh my harvest on my itty bitty kitchen scale which has a bowl that holds about 3 lbs. at a time. A produce scale! It was hard for me to keep a straight face and solemnly nod and say "ok, if you think so". Apparently, gardening is becoming a competitive event at work and he wants to be able to go into work and say with certainty "we harvested 75 lbs. of potatoes today" without having to wait three days for me to get them all sorted, graded and weighed. So, one day when I have nothing better to do, I'll sit down and look at produce scales online. Isn't it funny that people will become attached to one particular flavor of jelly? The chief of Tim's PD loves Apple Pie Jam, so I make him a case of it a couple of times a year. It is just insane how happy it makes him and it pleases me to know that he enjoys it so much because he's a great guy. Carol, If I had endless available space, I'd plant one row each of every type of southern pea I have and grow them side-by-side in a head-to-head competition. Instead, because they are one of the last things I plant in spring, they end up being squeezed in here and there wherever cool-season crops have been harvested. Regardless, they still produce well. I would have loved to have spent as much time in the garden today as you did, but it was just one of those days when so many non-gardening things needed to be done. I am still kind of worn out after all the potato digging, but i think it is more because I stayed out in the heat so much, and not the actual labor involved in digging potatoes from clay soil although it was pretty dry and pretty hard. I hope I can get a lot done tomorrow, but I've decided I'm just not going to stay outside after the temperature hits 95. That's plenty hot enough for me. My favorite time of the day is early in the morning when it almost feels cool. Our first summer deer showed up at the garden yesterday. It came crashing through the woods like it was being chased by something, emerged in the pasture just east of my garden and then froze when it saw me. I wondered if something was chasing it because it seemed very nervous. I waved my arms and yelled at it and it went away. I then checked my whole fenceline to make sure there wasn't anyplace it could get into the garden. One deer can almost wipe out an entire garden in one night of grazing and nibbling. Parts of the fence are 8' tall and parts are only 7' tall, and this was a really large deer so I think it could have jumped the 7' section and might have done so if I wasn't standing there in the garden. That's a lot of new tomato cages! I love my cages and use them for everything. I even have some of my peppers caged with 2' or 3' tall cages. The other peppers are staked so they won't fall over sideways when they have a heavy load of fruit later in the summer. The garden looks fairly good now that the yellowing/browning potatoes and onions are out of there. I now have onions and potatoes laid out all over the place in the shade drying and curing. In the current high heat and mostly low RHs, everything should dry and curl quickly. Dawn