I planted three types last year rice pea texas longhorn california califonia could not take the heat. rice peas did great, but peas so small so I won't plant them again. I loved Texas longhorn - they are large peas, maroon in color. They taste like boiled peanuts. They only take about 8 pods enough for one to have southern peas for dinner. They did great with all that heat last summer. I did water a lot though. This did not help the California peas though. They are very viney (5-7') and take 90 days to green stage. It could be that the extreme heat of last summer made them mature slower? I loved them. My garden may have needed more water since it is a new no till garden and worms have not had enough time to do my tilling for me. Hummus is much thicker this year, but now we have too much rain. I read Texas longhorn are similar if not the same as big red ripper, which should be easier to locate.

Carol, I don't grow long beans, which are not beans and are peas, botanically speaking (more about that in a minute) so I can't say anything about how you can or should cook them. The beans and peas are grouped botanically based on the taxonomy guidelines the botanical world uses, and the botanical world doesn't care if we steam, boil, fry, sautee', pickle or bake them since the don't classify them based on how they are ultimately prepared for human consumption. The best way I know to describe it is just to say that all true beans are classified as phaseolus vulgaris and all of the bean-like warm-season peas commonly called southern peas and yardlong beans/asparagus beans/noodle beans are classified as vigna unguiculata, so they are.....well, not close relatives, but more like distant cousins. Both the beans and the southern peas (including those erroneously named 'bean' instead of 'pea') are in the same Kingdom (Plantae), Division (Magnoliophyta) Class (Magnoliospida), Order (Fabales), Family (Fabaceae) and Subfamily (Faboideae). (I don't guarantee I spelled all those correctly either). Then, they diverge, and the beans are in the Genus 'Phaseolus' and the species 'vulgaris' (which in this use means 'common', not 'nasty'); while the southern peas are in the Genus 'vigna' and the species 'umguiulata'. Phaseolus vulgaris includes all the beans grown and eaten as green beans, snap beans, shellies, and as dried beans, and a small group of nunas that are popped like popcorn. Vigna unguiculata includes all the southern peas (blackeyes, pinkeye purple hulls, crowders, zipper and cream peas) as well as common field peas used for forage (cowpeas) or soil improvement, red peas, asparagus peas and yardlong beans, which technically ought to be called yardlong peas. I haven't looked at them in Johnny's but I assume he lists them as beans because that is what they are commonly known as---asparagus bean, yardlong bean, etc. The warm-season southern peas and the rest of Vigna u. and Phaseolus vulgaris are distantly related to the cool-season English (shelled) peas, edible podded peas or snap peas, which are Pisum sativum, but which are in the same kingdom, division, order and family and subfamily as the first two but are in their own tribe, genus and species. I hope this all is at least as clear as mud. You can prepare any of them any which way your want.... Finally, I didn't even mention Scarlet Runner Beans which are beans but are in their own species, Phaseolus coccineus. They differ from Phaseolus vulgaris in several ways....they're from Central America and are perennial there, and I believe George has told us before that they are daylength sensitive. They are usually grown as annuals here, but I've heard of people clipping up the foliage and digging up/overwintering the tuber-type roots in a cellar or something and replanting them in the spring. There's also issues with them being considered toxic and having to be prepared carefully if you're going to eat them. And, even though they are called "Scarlet" runner beans, there are varieties that flower in other colors including white and yellow. Dawn

Hi Mark, The part of your garden featured in the photos looks great. You harvest them when the peas are filled out and you can tell that there are plump little peas in the pods. You can harvest them while the pods are still green (or after they've turned mostly purple if you're growing the purple hull pink eye types) or you can let the pods turn yellow and harvest them as dry beans. I prefer to harvest when they are in the green stage. You can harvest them at any stage between green and plump to yellow and dry. One way to test a couple is to pick them and attempt to shell them. If the 'test' pod opens easily and the peas are fully formed and easy to pop out of the pod, they're ready. If you have a hard time getting the pod to open and getting the peas out, you've harvested too early and should wait a few more days before you begin harvesting. With each variety, you'll learn exactly the pod color and degree of plumpness that tells you the peas are ready. I have a neighbor who loves them so much that he picks them too early every year even though he knows better! I generally recommend Pinkeye Purple Hull southern peas to first-time pea growers because they turn purple as they mature, so all you have to do is wait for them to turn purple. I like to cook my southern peas the old southern way by boiling/simmering them for about 45 minutes in a pot of water to which I've added some bacon or salt pork for flavoring. I salt and pepper them to taste. Usually, I'll chop up a little onion and add it to the pot, and sometimes add a chopped jalapeno pepper as well. Blackeyed peas fall in the southern pea category, which includes blackeyed peas, purple hull pinkeye peas, lady peas, zipper peas, cream peas and crowder peas. All of them are grown and prepared the same way. If you were raised in the south, it is pretty much mandatory that you serve them with fresh cornbread hot from the oven. Some southern peas are bush-types and some are pole-types, but even the bush types tend to act like half-runner pole beans and will climb whatever is nearby. They'll stay shorter and more well-behaved if there is nothing to climb, but if there is something even remotely nearby they'll stretch and reach for it and climb it. One year I had pinkeye purple hull peas cross the pathway between their bed and a tomato bed. They then climbed to the top of the tomato cages. Counting the space they crawled horizontally, those plants were about 10' in length, and they were not a pole type. However, the ones that were too far from anything to climb reached maybe 24 or 30" in height. My favorite southern pea, at least in terms of growth, is one known either as Mandy or Big Red Ripper. It will run on the ground or climb for up to 18-20'. I'm going to link a Pink Eye Purple Hull website because it has lots of great info on pinkeye purple hull peas. Its' info and recipes are fine for all types of southern peas, not just purple hull pink eye types. There are a lot of great recipes for southern peas on this website. Just substitute your peas for purple hull peas. And, just as an FYI, you can make pea hull jelly from the hulls after you've hulled the peas. Each type of pea hull jelly has its own unique flavor and color. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Recipes At Purplehull.com

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