This certainly isn't my fight - I don't even eat it, but a lot of people here in E. Tn. do eat poke. I do a fair amount of foraging, mostly to learn the wild plants and how to prepare them. Some I eat all the time, others I try just to taste. But I've been reading this exchange for a few days now, and I think some things should be emphasized. As long as I have a positive id, I don't mind eating plants that have toxic and edible components. In fact, I have a bowl of wild black cherries in the fridge that will become syrup later today after I separate out the toxic pits... not an easy task btw... However, when posting on a public message board, I always, ALWAYS lean to the side of caution. It's a simple maxim... what I am willing to do with my choices are a much different matter than what I suggest that others do with their own. In the case of the cherries... I'll be glad to tell you that the flesh of the fruit is edible, but I will heavily caution that, when working with them, I wouldn't even scratch the toxic pits. In fact, I wouldn't use any metal tools. I would also add that the person look up for themselves the toxicity of all parts of the trees, especially leaves drying on a broken branch. They routinely take out large cattle with much better digestive protections against wild foods. I try to be cautious, especially since foraging isn't really necessary to my lifestyle. I simply enjoy it. I like the idea of eating rare foods and flavors untouched by, and unavailable in, the factory food marketplace. And when discussing these foods on a public forum where some, potentially, may not have the faculties to understand the danger, why suggest that people cut corners? You don't ask for proof that it's poisonous. You assume it's poisonous! Knowledge is what helps a person make good choices. If you aren't 100% sure of what you are doing, you don't lessen the caution, you increase it. If you wish to take the risk yourself, that's a choice you live with (hopefully,) but you don't argue for the lessening of caution that might put others at risk. If you have the ability to hire a laboratory and test out the amount and effect of the toxin across a wide selection of poke varieties, as well as using various cooking methods, along with portion size, frequency of consumption, and weight and maturity level of the individuals consuming, then have at it - and please publish your findings. Until then, the cautions should remain in place.

Tracy, I used to have all kinds of trouble with pillbugs and sowbugs eating every single thing I planted. They'd start eating bean seedlings (and others too) as soon as they emerged from the ground and they'd eat their weight in garden produce all summer long, including munching on tomatoes, muskmelons, canteloupes, cucumbers and watermelons. I bought and used Slug-Go (iron phosphate in a pelleted form) after someone on GardenWeb mentioned that they used it for snails and slugs, but noticed after using it that their pillbug and sowbug problems went away, and so did their cutworms. After seeing many similar anecdotal reports, I bought the Slug-Go to use on sow bugs and pill bugs and found it worked wonders. I was so excited. In the meantime, these anecdotal reports reached the manufacturer and they worked to improve the Slug-Go to make it even more effective on sowbugs and pillbugs by adding spinosad, and the result was Slug-Go Plus. In my garden, Slug-Go and Slug-Go Plus seem equally effective, as do any of the similar organic snail and slug baits that contain iron phosphate as the active ingredient. Since I started using them I simply don't have problems with roly polies at all any more, nor do I have cutworm issues. I've never had snail or slugs most likely because my clay isn't high enough in organic matter to be attractive to them, but we've always had tons of roly polies under the mulch. Now we don't. If you can't find Slug-Go or SLug-Go Plus in local stores, they're widely available from online retailers. I buy some before the start of every season so I'll have it at planting time. Whether directly sowing seeds or transplanting, I scatter the Slug-Go Plus on the soil surface following the label directions after I've planted and watered in whatever I planted. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Sluggo Plus

Carol, It is a very odd year and plants have behaved in strange ways. I've noticed that tomato plants all over the county look pretty awful---it really shows that we have had just under 50" of rain and tomato plants have suffered greatly with bacterial and fungal infections. I just don't see any reason to attempt to spray any fungicide when it rains every few days. At least now it is only raining 2 or 3 days a week instead of every day. I cannot complain about the tomato harvest. We have tons of tomatoes, and not many of them worth eating because they are so watery and mealy, but they still make great salsa, and my peppers are finally producing a harvest. Our potato harvest was huge and most of the potatoes were a very nice size, but the broccoli yield was poor. The cabbage harvest was much better, and it was the best spring bean season we've had in ages. Onions were a mixed bag---many rotted in the ground due to all the heavy rainfall, but the ones that didn't rot were great. None of them would have stored long, so I cut up most of them for salsa and froze them in the amount needed for salsa batches. I lost track, but think I cut up enough for 25 or so batches of salsa, and I'm using them up fairly quickly. We kept a few for fresh eating in May and those are about done, so I bought a bag of Vidalia onions this week so we at least will have fresh onions, albeit not from our garden. Shortly after I planted watermelons and muskmelons to fill the rest of the onion best after the final harvest and the cabbage bed, we then had about 8" of rainfall in the following week, and those beds look pretty bad now. I'm not sure the plants will make it. They look like they are in danger of rotting off at the soil line, and they're in raised beds so there's nothing much I can do for them that I didn't already try to do. That's one reason I gave up on trying to plant hot-season crops to replace spring crops. We're just staying too wet. I'm making salsa pretty much every day now, and intermittently harvesting peaches so I can freeze or can them and turn some into peach jelly. My garlic usually would be harvested by now, but remains green and not yet ready. I think the heavy rainfall stalled it and who knows if the bulbs will be any good when I finally get to harvest them. Cabbage whites were horrible here and I hand-picked cabbage worms and also cabbage loopers endlessly in between floods. It also is a big year for cucumber beetles, so I'm guessing they thrive in persistently wet weather. The corn harvest was great and the coons didn't get a single ear. Maybe they didn't want to get their feet wet. If we don't get huge amounts of rainfall in the next week (and we should't), I still might plant southern peas for a fall harvest. I just hate the thought of planting them and then watching and waiting for them to sprout while the seed rots in the ground. Every time that I think I might plant this, that or the other, rain pours down and changes my mind. I have canna lilies in the garden that are 8' tall. Normally they top out around 6' tall because I don't irrigate them, but this year they're growing like there's no stopping them. In May they had stalled in the heavy rainfall, but they're making up for it now. The weather is so bizarre. There are things I never did in April or May and now it is mostly too hot to do them, so some parts of the garden remain well-mulched and fairly weed-free and others are just a mess. Luckily, the messy parts are at the downhill side of the garden which no one can see from the road or driveway while the uphill parts are in really good shape since they had less standing water and I could weed them regularly. I feel very fortunate to have harvested as much as we did---some of my gardening friends just gave up after the Sunday flooding wiped out whatever was left of their gardens. The 1 to 3" that fell last Sunday was sort of the last straw after the 6 to 12" that had fallen a few days before (the night Ardmore flooded). I'm operating in typical hot weather mode now----harvest first thing in the morning, going out to the garden most days right at sunrise. I'd go out earlier if I could, but I have to wait for it to be light enough outdoors to see the snakes. Then I water the plants in containers if they need it. Naturally, if I check them and think they don't need watering, we'll hit 95 degrees with blazing sun and a high heat index and the container plants will look wilty by late afternoon. So, then I run out and water them. If I check them in the morning and decide to go ahead and water them, it then will rain in the afternoon. That happened yesterday. I spend the hot part of the day indoors processing the harvest or cooking it for lunch and/or dinner. Then I decide not to go back out into the garden after dinner to weed or do anything else because it is too hot, I am too tired and the mosquitoes are too annoying. Everything about this garden year seems off--from having to hold onions and plant them late due to waterlogged soil (if only I'd known how much worse the soil would get once May arrived!) to feeling like we didn't even have the month of May----we went right from a mild and wet April to a hot June with no real gardening time in between because every day the rain was keeping us indoors. On the bright side, every tree we have has made tremendous growth with one flush of new foliage following another after every rainstorm, and there's tons of wildflowers for once. I am loving that part of this year. I expect we will set a new rainfall record this year as we're already surprisingly close, but don't think we'll set any harvest records at all.

Congrats on the radishes! That's true about the rest coming soon! Since I'm so far south, my harvest always is ahead of those of you who are further north, but once your first radishes are producing, then everything else should be following closely behind. We're now in a mad dash down here to keep up with the harvesting, eating and preserving of the asparagus and cool-season greens. As our temperatures crank up into the 80s over the next few days, the spinach is going to start getting unhappy, so I need to harvest it quickly. It doesn't last long once we get hot, and we've had too many hot days already. On the bright side, once the spinach is done, that leaves an open space to plant a warm-season succession crop. Since the asparagus started producing a month early because of the winter that lacked true winter weather, I'm thinking it will end early as well, so I'm trying to keep up with harvesting it in a timely manner, which is hard to do as my focus is now shifting towards planting more warm-season crops. It is hard not to enjoy all the early warm and hot days we've had this year already, but they can push the cool-season crops along almost too quickly. I noticed yesterday that one lettuce plant is trying to bolt already.....maybe it was that 88 degree day we had a week or two ago. I have a gazillion little lettuce plants in flats, though, to use as succession crops, so today I'll just harvest it and then pop a new plant into its space. I planted my first lettuce plants in January, so they are aging now, but we've had a good harvest from them for some time and younger plants are coming along in different spots too.