Well, I have grown tall peas up on twine like Donnabaskets and Camp10, and my parents re-use chicken wire and T-posts every year. Both of those work fine. This year I'm going to plant around tomato cages made of re-enforcing wire since a bunch of them came with the new house and it seems like less work. Though I think I might need to be sure to get the cages in good so I don't have any troubles in the wind we tend to get in spring. For short peas I've tried not staking (floppy mess and a lot of the pea pods get ruined), brushy twigs, a bush bean support (a sort of grow-through gridabout 8 inches high), and short stakes and twine. All of those methods except the first worked fine but I ended up coming to the conclusion that I prefer working with tall peas more when it comes to harvest time. Cheers!

Dave, the field peas as per dilla's link and of what are typically used for "split-pea" soup are of the same family as "english peas" or "green peas", brought from europe to NA: pisum sativum. Southern peas or cowpeas of course as you know are the family Vigna from africa and have a dramatically different taste from pisum(IMO), Yeah, I know. Thus the use of "moniker" as opposed to genus or family since many use the common labels interchangeably, incorrectly but still interchangeably. A long discussion over on the Harvest forum some months back came up with several more alternate labels for them but I can't recall all the "we call them" names folks came up with. Sorry if any confusion. But whatever one calls them, they still are not productive enough in the typical home garden to off-set their inexpensive store-bought cost. Dave

Here are a couple of tasty variations in different colors: Red Lentil Soup With Lemon (NY Times 1/9/08) Time: 45 minutes 3 tablespoons olive oil, more for drizzling 1 large onion, chopped 2 garlic cloves, minced 1 tablespoon tomato paste 1 teaspoon ground cumin 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, more to taste 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper Pinch of ground chili powder or cayenne, more to taste 1 quart chicken or vegetable broth 1 cup red lentils 1 large carrot, peeled and diced Juice of 1/2 lemon, more to taste 3 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro. 1. In a large pot, heat 3 tablespoons oil over high heat until hot and shimmering. Add onion and garlic, and sauté until golden, about 4 minutes. 2. Stir in tomato paste, cumin, salt, black pepper and chili powder or cayenne, and sauté for 2 minutes longer. 3. Add broth, 2 cups water, lentils and carrot. Bring to a simmer, then partially cover pot and turn heat to medium-low. Simmer until lentils are soft, about 30 minutes. Taste and add salt if necessary. 4. Using an immersion or regular blender or a food processor, purée half the soup then add it back to pot. Soup should be somewhat chunky. 5. Reheat soup if necessary, then stir in lemon juice and cilantro. Serve soup drizzled with good olive oil and dusted lightly with chili powder if desired. Yield: 4 servings. ============================================================ Yellow Split Pea and Sweet Potato Soup (www.wholefoods.com) 1 cup yellow split peas 1 quart vegetable broth 1 medium sweet potato, peeled and cut into ½-inch slices 7 whole green cardamom pods 1Â2 tablespoons ghee (clarified butter) or canola oil 1 medium yellow onion, chopped 1 teaspoon garam masala 1/2Â1 teaspoon ground cumin lemon Cayenne pepper sea salt, to taste ground pepper, to taste Soak the peas in water to cover overnight. Drain and rinse. Bring vegetable broth to a boil in a medium pot. Add soaked peas, sweet potato slices and cardamom pods. Reduce heat to a simmer and cover. Simmer for an hour. (N.B. I skipped the soaking and gave the split peas a 15 minute head start and simmered until the peas and potato were falling apart -- less than an hour) Heat ghee in a skillet over medium heat. Add onions, garam masala and cumin and cook for 10 minutes, stirring often. When sweet potatoes and peas are tender, add the spiced onions to the pot. Stir and cook another 5 minutes. Remove cardamom pods and season the soup with lemon, cayenne, salt, and pepper, as desired. Serves 4

A grass patio isn't fun to use when it's wet, you have to move furniture to mow (as stated above), and god help you if you have a fidgeter (I would have a bare spot under my seat in about three hours). Of all the gravels I like the look of pea gravel the best. If you do an inch or so of pea gravel over a compacted base of 21a/ABC/crusher run, it's very solid and walkable, but it's still a rounded stone. The more use the patio sees, the more it'll migrate. As Yard mentioned above, an angular stone stays put better. Here we used #8 chip gravel at a VERY busy winery (lots of foot traffic) and there's very little migration into the beds or lawn areas. In your circumstance, I'd build the patio on a base of 6 inches compacted crusher run, then an inch of your decorative aggregate. An advantage of this is that down the road if budget allows, the decorative aggregate and a little of the crusher run can be scraped off and the patio converted to dry-laid flagstone. That's how we did our patio, because our 100 year old home still needs a new kitchen and a new downstairs bathroom and a new boiler and... yeah don't buy old homes unless you're independently wealthy. Anyhow that's my .02