For your nigella and blackberry lily, I have the J. red maple "Bloodgood" and a threadleaf. Doreen.

Is your banana shrub rooted? Do you have a picture? I have vanilla - email me.

For less than the cost of stamps, you can easily get those seeds. Try the dollar store. My friend got 3pkg. for $1.oo for a project with her class.

Slow would have been good, I think, Carol! This is a recipe from 1945. Hand-mincing was all that was possible. They'd have ended up with fewer, larger pieces, and in retrospect, I think that would actually have been better than lots of very tiny ones. You could pick them out. The idea of making the vanilla sugar ahead of time is a good one too. I processed the sugar with pieces of the bean. And processed, and processed. I ended up with sugar so superfine that some of it was powdered, and my whole kitchen was covered with a fine white dust. But the bits of bean were not fine enough. I started the sifting process. Parts passing through the strainer still looked like tiny bugs -- not the look I wanted in my cheesecake! Changing to my finest tea strainer, I couldn't get the sugar to pass through. By that time I just wanted to get finished, and I used Penzey's double-strength vanilla. It was late, I was tired and hungry for dinner, so I was really glad to have the cake in the oven, and glad I had finally made this recipe. Then I saw the cup of sour cream sitting on the counter. Sigh. So I still have not tried Katish's Cheesecake. I'll report back on how Sort-of Katish's Cheesecake tastes. It actually rose to the top of the pan, so the extra cup pof volume might have been a problem (or might just have risen up and stayed okay). Here is a link that might be useful: Katish's Cheesecake