My first garden was at a community garden in Seattle. I had 100 square feet to work but, beginner’s luck, it was one of my most productive gardens. I followed simple instructions from a book and was rewarded with a lot of good food. Yet, despite the size of this small garden, I found myself buying a lot of stuff. Even years later, it can be really hard to resist the stuff!
As a new gardener, I wanted to grow peas and snap beans and my trusty book explained how I needed to build trellises. The systems were simple: frames built from wooden poles strung with twine. But, as an apartment dweller, I found myself paying for bamboo stakes and the small amounts of twine found in the garden section of my local hardware store. When you are learning, you do not always know when you are being taken for a ride! Even now that I could build trellises nearly for free using small branches and twine bought in bulk, building them can be an obstacle to just getting seeds in the ground. More and more I have found myself planting bush or dwarf varieties of peas and beans and being perfectly content with the results.
Peas
This year, I grew Sienna, a bush pea that Territorial Seed Company claims was the highest-yielding shelling pea in their trial. I grew it in a new no-dig bed that was having some nitrogen tie-up issues and in a hügelkultur bed. Rock. Star. Cultivar. Spaced closely, they grew like gangbusters and babysat themselves until harvest time. We ate our fill fresh and then I freeze-dried them for winter use. They rehydrate exceptionally well. These will get put on repeat every year.



In my hotbeds, I grew Sugar Ann dwarf sugar snap peas, which gave me snap peas way ahead of my trellised varieties. However, I think the peas suffered a bit from the bottom heat of the hotbed. Next year, I will simply plant them in the ground or on the side of a hügelkultur mound. Is the flavor quite as tantalizing as Cascadia or Sugar Snap? Maybe not but the only requirements for pretty decent sugar snap peas is soil and a packet of seeds.
Beans
Two years ago, I grew armloads of beans off a packet of Provider, a “classic” bean because it was known to germinate in cooler soils, which it did admirably. This year, I am trying out Cupidon from Adaptive Seeds, which they claim is “one of the best beans, period.” The pods are growing and I am looking forward to testing them in the kitchen. I am also growing Missouri Bill, a dry shelling bean developed off the San Juan islands. As a home gardener, I would not normally take up this much space with a shelling bean but I was having such nitrogen tie-up issues in a new no-dig bed that I said “screw it”, ripped the sad spring plants out and let a nitrogen-fixer feed itself this first year. They have kicked bean-butt and a problematic bed will now provide us with a pantry staple in its first year.

Takeaways
Trellises are great, really. If you enjoy building them or playing with hog panels, they add wonderful vertical space to a garden and open up a wide array of possibilities. The vining varieties have the advantage of being indeterminate, so harvests can be staggered over time. (If you want to stagger a bush bean or pea harvest, just sow seeds every ten days for a few weeks!) Sometimes, the goal is just to put seeds in the ground and get good food back in a few weeks. Bush beans and peas will happily do that for you, nothing else required.
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