Beans are one of the easiest vegetables to grow, a garden staple for most families.  From fresh snap beans to dry shelling beans, they can provide food from summer through winter.  Some varieties grow low to the ground as bush beans and other climb as high as you allow them as pole beans.  Bush beans are usually much earlier than pole beans and produce all their beans at once, with successive flushes through a shorter season.  Pole beans take longer to begin producing, but produce until frost, giving you a nice harvest every few days.  I always plant some of each.  The bush beans give us that first harvest, and are a great choice for canning.  As soon as they drop off, the pole beans begin producing and produce for the rest of the summer.  My favorite shelling beans are pole beans.  With our wet summer and fall, the bush beans are prone to molding and mildew, but the wind blows through the pole beans, up above the weeds and ground, and they dry nicely without as many mold problems.  

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