Born and raised in a northeastern city, I didn’t know how oats, peas, beans or barley grew, or what most of them looked like. But after marrying and nesting in Tennessee, I learned at least two things about peas and beans: picking and shelling them is not painless, and there are more varieties of these nutritious legumes than you can count on all the digits of your hands and feet.

As I recall, in my growing up years precious few kinds of peas and beans were served at our table. There were round green peas that came in a can. We didn’t call them green peas, English peas, early peas, or sweet peas. Just peas. We didn’t know there were other kinds. And there were string beans. These also came in a can, except in the summer when we would get some fresh at the local grocery store. We liked to eat some of them raw as we snapped them. Then there were Boston baked beans, sweetened with molasses and brown sugar. We had a large family on a low income, so sometimes there were cooked dried beans, too. What kind? Just beans.

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I could never quite figure out what distinguished a pea from a bean. Are the round legumes designated as peas? Recently I found some definitions on the Internet, from the USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council. Peas are cool season legumes and more tolerant of cold temperatures. The pods grow on a bush, and they mature and are ready for harvest in 70 to 90 days. By contrast, beans require warmer temperatures than peas, typically grow in pods on a bush, and mature and are ready for harvest in 85 to 115 days.

Another website informed me that peas have tendrils and beans do not, and the seed food storage structures (cotyledons) on beans emerge from the soil, whereas on peas they do not.

One site said the major difference between peas and beans is that peas have a hollow stem and beans a solid stem.

Probably the above information won’t change what we call these tasty vegetables. Oops, botanically, I suppose they are actually fruits.

I don’t think Daddy Jim (the children’s paternal grandfather) cared what they were called. Just give him a bushel of them to shell, and he’d sit, shelling away as he watched his favorite baseball team – the Cardinals – on TV. Nowadays we don’t sit and shell peas or beans in the kitchen or on the porch. Yes, we still grow them, but when we lost our labor force (our children) to college and careers, my pea-loving husband suddenly felt the need for a speeded–up process to shell those protein-packed legumes. With the semi-automatic pea sheller Larry created, we can shell a 5-gallon bucket of them quicker than we can pick them. We just feed the moistened pods through the rollers and the peas or beans slide down to the waiting receptacle, with the pods dropping into another container.

Well, after more than two-score years in Tennessee, I think I know something about how peas and beans grow; however, I can’t say the same about oats and barley yet!