We live in eastern west virginia and have a lot of different kinds of snakes. I was always taught the only good snake is a dead one, even before moving to the mountains. My nephew killed a three foot timber rattler the other day, but it was in their goat cage. We usually don't kill them unless they are poisonous or threatening us or our animals. A woman that I sell at the local farmers market with was telling us how the rattle snakes in Texas will rattle when you get anywhere close to them, but the ones here don't rattle at all until they are about to strike. My neice was the one that spotted the snake in the goat cage and had to warn my brother in law cause he was about to step on it. The snake never even rattled and they are lucky she spotted it. Ever since that happened I have been on high alert for snakes. They scare me so much, any snake at all. We are really far from a hospital (like 45 - hour), so I never want to take the chance of getting bitten. What would be a good option to keep snakes out of our fenced in area in the yard, where we have dogs and a 7 month year old who likes to play outside? Something that isn't the spray "snake guard" or whatever. It says it only lasts 30 days and is like $50 for a quart.

So I know this is an old thread, but it's sitting here near the top of the list and perhaps someone will see it and they can weigh in on whether or not I'm completely off base (which is a very plausible scenario). I apologize if anything, or everything I say has already been said (with nearly 60 replies and a decade of discussion I admit I did not read everything) or if I am missing the point entirely. First of all, I am not as passionate about beans as others. I know the couple of varieties I like and grow well in my garden which I save seed from. I am not much of genealogist, nor do I have the extensive knowledge on the history of beans, let alone greasy beans, that others here do have. I do however have a working understanding of biology and genetics genetics as well as history so take my opinion (I can not stress that word enough here) for what its worth. When biologists looks for point of origin of anything, one of the common and most precise ways of doing so is at the genetic level. At what locality is there the greatest degree of genetic difference is where you usually wind up with your answer. In humans this is relatively "easy". You can trace Y-chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA variations to different points of origin by detecting the frequency of that variation amongst different populations. Since sex determination is far different in plant reproduction then human, I'm pretty sure that Y-DNA would be out of the question. mtDNA on the other hand I'm fairly sure is pretty standard across eukaryotic organisms and is often used in the phylogeny of many species across different kingdoms. If we all had easy access to sequencing the greasy bean genome, this question would have been answered long ago. Unfortunately this would require boocoo dollars and no shortage of devoted individuals to dedicate themselves to the task, so, as of this time, the question is not answerable by these methods. So what we have to go on is a little less precise but we can definitely arrive at some answers, possibly settle on one that we can all agree on. The nature of heirloom cultivars is such that so much of we know about them comes from memory. In some cases we can trace the ancestry of them very well because their history is well documented by those who created them. For instance we know that W. Atlee Burpee developed many strains of vegetables for his seed company and these developments were recorded and passed through history as primary sources and hard evidence. These cultivars are generally not as old as those we know less about. Those which have a much murkier history are much harder to trace, possibly impossible with any degree of certainty. Their stories are held in the respective memories of those who grow them. Often, the final word on the specific cultivar is "my family has grown them for generations" or "as long as I can remember." This is not a very definite answer since we have no idea if their great great great grandfather got the seeds from someone else or purposely/inadvertently developed them himself. If, in the former case, from whom did he get them from and where did they get it from? For all we know, a man moved from New York to Georgia and sold his new neighbor some seeds that brought with him. The neighbor then shared with others and eventually this new town became a hotspot for this cultivar and it's lineage. If no one bothered to record the transactions, we may erroneously come to the conclusion that this cultivar is a native of Georgia, rather then New York which is the true origin of it. Or perhaps our New Yorker was an immigrant who had originally brought the seeds with him from Europe, thus again, a point of origin that may be lost forever. We similarly can't go by name alone since often the name of the cultivar changes depending on who is growing and their own personal story tied to it. Another problem we have is once again tied to family memories and stories. If you've ever delved into your family history, you know that it is a lot like the game telephone. Your great aunt Millie tells you a story about your great great grandfather that she heard from her grandmother and your great Aunt Sally tells you the same story that is completely different and she heard it from her Aunt Rosie. Such is the case with the genealogy of our plants. So how CAN we arrive at a logical conclusion about the history of our prized veggies? I think the closest we can come is by paralleling our very first way of using genetic frequency and variation with the morphology that is a result of it. It is often that these visual clues that determines whether what we are growing is a distinct cultivar or just a differently named one of the same. In which location do we see the least variation in the phenotype of the bean? It is very likely that wherever we find the least difference, whether it be a county, a single state or a tri-state area, is where the bean came from. In this particular story, we may not be able to pinpoint it to one state. From what I have read, this type of bean traces it's roots to pre-Columbian America long before the states of Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina were ever dreamed up. The Cherokee people who are the likely source of the bean would have traveled throughout the region without regards borders of states that would be drawn generations later. It might be that we find the point of origin in a much broader area that encompasses several states rather then just one and we would have to be happy with that answer I think. A perfect example of this was when I was researching the origin of a breed of chicken that has an equally confused history as that of our greasy bean. Through scoring primary resource documents from the mid-19th century I was able to find that at the time of its conception, this particular breed was the source of an immense amount of controversy and there was no definitive answer, even in it's early days. I was able to narrow it down to about 2 or 3 different possibilities but all the same I was forced to concede that mystery will likely never be solved with 100% accuracy (at least not by me). There were simply too many conflicting stories and even more unanswered questions that have been taken to grave. There are a HUGE number of variables that I haven't mentioned, to be sure. But this is a simple breakdown of how I feel that we can at least start and then bring up the all the different possibilities as they arise.

Thanks for all your hard work Karen! Can't wait to read it in its entirety. Jodi-

Hi all, I also recently "discovered" Hakan Nesser and have read the first 6 (or was it 7) titles in his Van Veeteran series. While I like Van Veeteran as a character, as someone said, chess, fine music and wine, with a fair smattering of philosophy, I found that the series got more disturbing as it went on. Darker, more crude. I have not requested any further titles from the library as the last one put me out of sorts. I need a break. Just finished reading This House is Haunted by John Boyne. The blurb claims it to be a "Dickensian ghost story". I think not. It was spooky and dark yet neither gory nor graphic. I think it more of a Victorian style, but Dickensian is much too much praise. It was a fun read, albeit slightly predictable, for the season of All Hallow's Eve. Speaking of ghosts, I also read the latest by Simone St. James, The Other Side of Midnight. The main character is a psychic and she was hired to solve the murder of another psychic. It was okay, not as good as her first two books; The Haunting of Maddy Clare and An Inquiry into Love and Death. I second and third the praise for both Geraldine Brooks and her spouse, Tony Horwitz. I read everything he wrote and most of what she wrote. (I like his stuff much more, if you are curious.) Now reading Six Questions of Socrates by Christopher Phillips. He is the head of the Society for Philosophical Inquiry. In this book, he poses the six questions of Socrates to different demographic groups, in different countries and shares the differences and similarities. I am only on page 23 and find it fascinating. The six questions are: What is virtue? What is piety? What is good? What is justice? What is moderation? What is courage? He simply goes to a public area and starts chatting. Soon there is a Socratic circle discussion going on and wow... nary a cell phone nor a google search in sight. The conversations sound just amazing and I am quite jealous I have not yet stumbled upon one. PAM