I figured I'd put my 2 cents in anyway & see if anyone wanted me, even though I joined the site last year. lol I'd put up my 'wanted' list & what I have to trade, but I don't know how to do that. I live near Tulsa, Oklahoma.. Some maps say that's zone 7, some say it's zone 6, so I don't know exactly what zone I'm in. Like kawaii_fruit, I am mostly interested in vegetables & edible flowers, as well as collecting some more exotic/different/unusual kinds of plants. I also have an interest in bonsai (but want to know more about it, first!). Like Kawaii_Fruit, I also don't have a lot of room to work with. I have a 4x8 square foot garden & lots of containers around there. I use compost, potting mixes & that kind of thing for everything, except nasturtiums. I planted those in the ground, since they like bad soil & little water. :D lol Right now I have adzuki beans, green beans, korean summer squash, a few varieties of tomatoes, thai purple eggplants, a variety of herbs, 2 kinds of Asian watermelons, several varieties of peppers, multi-colored bell peppers (as well as the usual ones), korean shiso (i have an abundance of that & would be interested in giving some away, if it wouldn't hurt the plants), I also have some bunching onions, 2 kinds of chives, garlic, shallots, onion bulbs, Kyoto red carrots, Japanese kabocha pumpkins, Korean summer radishes & ponytail radishes & several types of leaf lettuce, arugala & rainbow swiss chard. As for herbs, I have 4 types of basil, 2 types of mint, 2 types of dill, parsley, chamomile, catnip & that's all I can think of at the moment.. lol I am interested in organic gardening, composting & growing different kinds of ginger, lemongrass, etc.. (I cook a lot of Asian foods).. I would also like to learn about growing water plants, like lotus (for the roots).. :)

got your email nogmo, thank you, these lists make me want to look up more and see what is out there.I think my mom will kill me if i put more flowers in her garden. :') Maybe i can get some she will like then i won't get into to much trouble, LOL I really do like those one's with more different colors in them though. The lady slipper balsams have finally ripened up. Out goes alot of bubblers tomarow. I will keep checking to see what is new, I also have some white, pink cypress vine seeds. *tabor*

I usually have a few tomatoes with BER, but this year I had three times as many. All of the BER was on container plants so I feel sure it was a moisture issue. I had one raised bed with squash. I had a patty pan, a yellow straight, and several zucchini plants. The zucchini was the only thing that produced, but probably only 20 percent of the female blossoms were pollinated and the rest died on the vine. I had one patty pan squash before the vines started to look sickly. I finally just removed them. I had honey bees, bumble bees, wasps, and 20 million of those little white butterflies that were all over everything. I have had an excellent year for cucumbers, both slicing and pickling. I only did one planting of each in early Spring and they are still producing daily and are still blooming. They have not been treated with anything and nothing has bothered them. I have had lots of beans. The pole beans starting producing very early this year. I planted Blue Lake bush beans and picked them for about a month then took them out. The bean was very productive, but was hard to pick because the beans grow low on the plant. The pill bugs did some damage to the low growing beans and I should have used Sluggo there, but didn't. This long stretch of hot, hot days has slowed the beans for now, and that's a good thing, because all of the tomatoes are finishing at once. I have never seen it this dry in the 11 years that I have been here. We drove to Joplin today and noted that the grass was brown along the road. This is green country and we rarely see that. It got a little better as we got closer to Joplin, but nothing looked like it normally does. My tomato plants are only still in the garden because they are still producing tomatoes. Very soon, I plan to yank them out and plant something else. They are drying and looking dead and I plan to put them out of their misery. LOL At the end of most days, the pepper plants looks so droopy that I wonder if they will make another day, but the next day they are fine. If cooler weather doesn't happen as promised then I will probably give them shade next week. I finally pulled the last of my onions this week. That was an experiment that worked and I know now that I can grow long day onions. Although not all of them were large, some were quite large. I see great wisdom in 'putting by' two years worth of food, because in Oklahoma it seems like very few things produce a good crop every year. I would love to get a nice gentle Fall that would provide some lovely days in the garden. Yeh, right, I'm awake now!

Boy, those must be some huge tamales Jerreth makes! LOL I've always wanted to make tamales, as I love them but if I made them I'd use less fat so they probably wouldn't taste right. There used to be a man in Bartlesville who would set up a stand on the corner somewhere. My Dad would buy from him on his way home from work. We didn't get to "eat out" in those days so it was a real treat for Dad to bring those home. Of course that was years and years ago and I'm sure the man probably died before I started working in Bartlesville in the early 1980's. That or they quit allowing him to sell on the corner. That's a nice looking pumpkin patch, I'll be interested to hear how they taste. If they all look different from one another, I imagine they taste different from one another, too? Do the seeds all look the same? I'm still watching my one little Warsaw Buff pumpkin. It changed color but I noticed that it has some faint green streaks in the buff so I held off picking it. Larry, my Dad had a paw-paw tree that would make maybe one or two small paw-paws every year. He was so proud of that and he would eat those paw-paws all himself, cutting them up in his hand with his trusty pocket-knife. This was back in the days when no self-respecting man would be caught without a pocket-knife in his pocket. I think it would've gone gang-busters if he had planted a second one, to polinate. Quailhunter, I do love the heirloom tomatoes and the fact that I can save the seed but if I continue to have as much trouble with disease as I have had last year and this year, I may consider going to the more disease-resistant hybrids myself. I may buy a pack of those Whopper seed and give them a try.