The younger the snap bean, the more tender they are. The older they get (the more the seed develops), the tougher and/or stringier they are. Correct? I thought so.

I'm stumped then, as to why my Blue Lake pole beans are tough when they're young and tender when they're huge and lumpy. Experience tells me this is backwards, but I can't argue with what I'm seeing.

Seven feet away from the Blue Lake are runners producing tender pods that are holding for much longer than I would expect; they're tender when small or large (within reason). On the other side of the garden are some more Blue Lakes (also behaving backwards) as well as nearby Emerites and Painted Ladies which are lovely and tender and behaving normally.

This is the first year I've gotten the Blue Lakes in early enough to produce in our short season, so I don't have experience with them. Is this a trait of this particular bean or is something causing them to be so tough from the get go?

Everything else in the garden is flourishing. It's all watered as needed with (unlimited free) water from a nearby dugout. We ammended the soil in the spring and I haven't fertilized all season because nothing appeared to need it.

The only out-of-the-ordinary thing we did for the first time this year was apply sulphur to the soil early in the spring. (The soil here is remarkably alkaline. We used to have well water and I couldn't use it for our fish tank because it was basically "liquid rock" as the aquarium folks would call it.) One application got our pH down to 6.5 -ÃÂ further than we were going for, but not a catastrophe by any means. The garden is bursting at the seams! Might the Blue Lakes be more sensitive to pH than other beans?