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["Kieran &/or Donna" <holycow@frontiernet.net>]

Email me holycow@frontiernet.net if you'd like to read the article I wrote for SSE when I first learned about cutshorts.  Any bean that was traditionally grown in corn will do, they have to be shade tolerant to do it.  These beans are commercially extinct because they were neither fish nor fowl, neither shelly nor snap.  Southern Exposure has a few, but the place to look is Sandhill Preservation.  Keep in mind that it's just one couple doing all the work of keeping these varieties alive.  I used to be able to pick up new stock pretty easy here in the edge of some very poor Tennessee counties, but too many of the oldtimers have died and their kids and grandkids live on fast food.  

 

http://www.sandhillpreservation.com/catalog/bean.html

 

I think the peanut bean will do, and maybe Klines potato patch.  Ireland Creek Annie is probably perfect.  OH, he's got more at the bottom of the page.  Greasy black cornfield, Ohio cutshort, Old time Cutshort, Tennessee cutshort, Tennessee Greasy, and probably Turkey Craw.  I'm not sure if I've grown Turkey Craw on corn, but it's a terrific bean.  Seeds don't look like cutshorts because of a unique way of laying them in the pods, like a row of tires fallen over.  It's a big bean too, well, for a cutshort.  If you try the pink tip cornfield, be sure to check and make sure it's not tough hulled, because if it is the carpenter bees will cross it into all your other beans.  I never let a tough hulled bean in my garden, now that I've had to nearly start over after they crossed so badly.  But someone in Indiana, Mary Fox I think was her name, kept 150 vars of beans because there were no pollinators to cross them.   Donna