I am a Southerner. I grow and eat peas. IMHO pinkeye purple hull and zipper cream are the best. My favorite is the zipper. It is very easy to shell compared to many varieties. They are best when shelled just as the pod is turning blond. The size of the seed is very large. The taste is mild and texture creamy. Pinkeye purple hull are a close second. Green stage of the seed is harder to determine for a novice. Taste is great and texture is smooth. They can be blanched and frozen in zip bags for long storage. Youtube should have real southern recipes. I like mine boiled with a strip of bacon, salt and pepper. They should be easily mashed between thumb and finger when done. Don't use too much water when cooking, just enough to keep them covered. The broth should be very flavorful if done right. We usually cook a pan of cornbread with peas and beans. My family puts the peas and broth over our corn bread. We do not eat sweet cornbread. That's just nasty. Make yourself some hot pepper jelly to serve with those peas. I hope this was helpful.

Dbarron, the folks who ran Tavin's, the Thai BBQ place, retired, much to the dismay of many people I know. They are now using it for a weekly "restaurant" where procedes go to chatity. Thanks for the pea festival info, yolos. Larry, at rhe risk of being run out of the forum on a rail, I don't like black eyed peas, so I was worried about these. But they would make a good hot season crop, and good for soil. So, I thought I would try them.

Johnny, I always leave a few southern pea pods on the vines all winter for the birds, especially with the vining cowpeas (usually Red Ripper or Whippoorwill) that I grow on the garden fence. The ones that the birds and other wildlife don't eat will fall to the ground and some of them will sprout in the springtime. So, I don't have to plant southern peas to climb the garden fence as they will sprout all by their selves. This year, so many Red Rippers sprouted near the fence that I didn't even have to sow any seeds to fill in the gaps because there weren't any gaps. I plant my actual crop within the garden in rows because some years the deer are pretty hard on the vines on the fences. They usually get the peas (and sometimes the leaves) on the outside of the fences but I get to harvest the ones on the inside of the fences. I do the same thing with Armenian cukes, which I grow on the back garden's west fence. I grow the southern peas on the east fence, preferring a wall of green vines to a bare fence. The Armenian cukes that self-sowed along the fence in 2013 produced as much of a harvest in 2014 as the ones I planted myself in the garden in proper rows. The more veggies I can encourage to self-sow and perpetuate themselves annually, the happier I am. Our local feed store (a Tractor Supply store about 20 miles from our house, so local isn't really all that local) generally sells burlap potato sacks around the time of year when they are selling seed potatoes, but the only cotton feed sacks I've seen in recent years looked more like a craft-type reproduction that might not have been sturdy enough to actually hold anything with real weight to it, and that was several years ago that I saw those. Actually, I just remembered that I saw a stack of them a couple of weeks ago at a new Atwoods store in Gainesville, TX, across the Red River from where we live. They were big cloth feed sacks and were sitting in a big pile near hunting supplies like deer corn (which was in standard paper bag feed sacks), deer stands, camo clothing and such. There wasn't any sort of sign near the cloth feed sacks or any prices on them, and I couldn't figure out what empty cloth feed sacks had to do with hunting supplies, but I'm not a hunter. Maybe there is a hunting use for them that I just can't figure out. Based on the prints and patterns, they looked like they might have come from another country and kinda reminded me of feed sacks like my dad's family made clothing from back in the 1910s, 20s and 30s. It wasn't necessarily the prettiest clothing, but the price was right for a very large family during very hard times. I generally either can or freeze most everything that can be stored that way, reserving my dry storage areas for all the potatoes, onions, sweet potatoes and winter squash. We have a large walk-in pantry area, but I can so much (800 jars in 2014) every year that the jars fill up the shelves in our large walk-in pantry, and the overflow gets stored in plastic storage containers with lids that I slide underneath the beds in all the bedrooms. I am not sure where I'd squeeze in dried peas. We have a purple hull pea farm about 5 miles south of us and they sell peas by the bushel, so I could buy them dry and already shelled (yay!) for storage if I wanted to store some that way, but I usually put up more in the freezer than we can eat anyway and then, when the next year's peas are getting close to harvest, we have to hurry up and eat all the ones left in the freezer so there's room for the current year's harvest. There's usually not a single day in summer that I'm not harvesting/processing something for fresh eating right away or for storage so we can eat it long after the fresh eating season ends. Had I known back in the late 1990s that I'd regularly grow such a large garden after we moved here, I would have built a house with a bigger kitchen, a bigger utility room and pantry, and a proper root cellar. As the garden got bigger and bigger over the years, the space available to store crops stayed the same size, which can be a problem sometimes. Sometimes I store my root crops and winter squash in the tornado shelter, but I cannot fill it up as much as I'd like because we do have to actually use it for people during tornado warnings, so there has to be room for the people to squeeze into it. For additional food storage, I'd like to add a really large butler's pantry to the north side of the house, adjacent to the kitchen, so I could use it just for storing all the food processing, canning and dehydrating supplies, and jars and such, as there just isn't enough room in the house to store the harvest and all the supplies that I use for processing the harvest. I doubt we'll ever find time for a building project that large, at least until Tim retires, which is still a few years off. I try to grow as much of our food supply as I can, because I think organic, home-grown food is superior quality to commercial crops shipped hundreds or thousands of miles from where they were grown, but I create problems for us in terms of finding storage space for all of it. I imagine if a person wanted to buy actual cotton feed sacks, you could Google and find two different kinds: vintage ones being sold on e-Bay or Etsy and new ones being sold in bulk. The last time I saw some new cotton flour sacks being sold online, though, they didn't have the cool prints and patterns like they once did. They were just plain white or off-white cotton, probably muslin. Dawn

I harvested 4 different kinds yesterday. I have a 5th variety growing, but I want seeds from it, and it hasn't gotten big enough yet. I regret not planting PEPH this year, but I guess this is the year of the southern pea trials. The zippers make the biggest peas and have long pods, but the family didn't care for the taste. I have not cooked the others. Whippoorwill has small seeds. It got aphids. Pennyrile I've grown before, we like them. They make good sized seeds and long pods. Red ripper is new to me, slower to start flowering than the others. Then I have some yard long beans which can be eaten like snap beans. (All can be eaten that way if you get the pods small enough. But the long beans can be eaten to a larger size.) Long beans can be allowed to make peas and eaten that way, too. Haricots Rouge Burkina du Faso is the one I want seeds from. It didn't germinate well, so I don't have many plants. Pods are red, turning purple, which is kind of cool. Not very long.