Tony, e-mail me through my member's page. I have seed to Ralph's Italian Heirloom, an Italian Heirloom which I received from a seminary prof, back around '84. He got it from his Barber in Clarks Summit, PA; who raised it for years. He kept a shoe box of seed in his barbershop and encouraged customers to take some for their gardens. This bean is pretty good, but not my favorite for snaps, as it gets tough when it gets real large. But it is prolific and it is good as a snap, when young. The seed is quite large and round, like a Romano type. It's brown & beige speckled. George Tahlequah, OK

Dean, I grow an heirloom from my wife's family called Tennessee Cutshort. It is a pole variety which produces 5" fat pods with 5-8 somewhat square ended seeds. The pods, when well mature, have heavy strings. But this bean is actually a low effort bean to prepare. Though one can pick them very tender and with no strings, we prefer to let them fill out a bit and string them. The pods stay tender until they actually yellow down as they dry and the tender seeds are delicious. Usually when we cook a pot of these we have shelly beans in with our snaps. The large fat pods make it easy to quickly fill the pot. And, as often happens in our household, if we leave them on the counter too long, they are still tender, even if they begin to dry out a bit. This is a good bean for growing on corn or poles. It has "Kentucky Wonder brown" colored seed. This year a couple of us grew this bean and two others; Childers Cutshort from gene_washdc and Ruth Bible. Childers is a family heirloom in Gene's family. Ruth Bible is an heirloom which has been listed by a few members of the Seed Savers Exchange for over 20 years. Both of these beans come from KY. I need to compare notes with the others. But I couldn't distinguish between Tennessee Cutshort and Childers Cutshort, other than that one of the Childers Cutshort vines produced violet colored flowers and lightly streaked pods when they were drying down. The great majority of Childers, and all of the other beans, produced white flowers and green pods which dried down yellow. Ruth Bible has a rounder, narrower pod and averages at least one more bean per pod than the other two. In this, my first time to trial it, I found it produced nearly twice as many seeds as the others. But unlike the other two its pods got tough when they were drying down. All three are excellent beans. My wife has been singing a happy tune this summer, whenever she works with our bean harvest! Incidentally, all three of these beans would be great for dry beans, snaps or shell beans. There are MANY good beans out there. But my family has "arrived." We will seek no farther. George Tahlequah, OK Here is a link that might be useful: Childers & Tennessee Cutshort thread

Presently, I have more vareties of seed than I have space to grow out, but I may be able to contribute some to your collection, depending on what you are seeking. I'll E-mail a list when I can (I won't offer it publicly because I don't have enough seed for that), or you can E-mail your wish list. BTW, I was born in WNY and spent most of my life there. Jim

George, That's basically what I needed, a rough idea about weight, productiveness, and longevity. Looking at the math is making me wish I was able to return to my old job. I already knew that selling the pole beans even for twice what one would sell tomatos was going to be labor intensive. I've got time to think this over, but like I said, I knew this wasn't going to be a very lucrative money making operation. I've eaten pole beans before and agree with what you say about quality. There's something else that most folks don't know about green beans, specifically the canned ones. We know that large food growing companies must grow bush beans so the harvesting machines can swoop them up. There was a woman who went to a church I used to go to that had worked in a canning factory in California. She told me that when the harvesting machines cut and picked up the bean bushes, they also picked up anything that happened to be attached. From there in the canning plant, beans would be sorted and "picked over". After that, the beans were placed in a solution to dissolve anything that adhered to them, some of which was described as being bits and pieces of some pretty disgusting stuff. Then the beans were apparently rinsed and canned. I don't know for sure if all this is true, but to this day, the way she described the process, I haven't been able to bring myself to eat another can of green beans. Since then I've sampled green beans in the produce section of stores and found they taste like cardboard. And "freshness"? Forget it! Well, whether I sell the pole beans or not, I've planted a LOT of them, and will hopefully have enough for fresh eating and want to can enough to last through this next winter and the following one since I don't know what my health is going to do. Thanks for the info George. This was very helpful. One way or another, we'll have food for the table and some good healthy and TASTY fresh food ahead of us this summer, plus some to put by "Good Lord willing and the creek don't rise". Barbara