just a lil pinch of buckwheat anyone??? :)

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.

Just wanted to address the picture (my pics) issue really quickly. I have often been accused of over-sharing on the internet. I live on a corner lot, so anyone who frequents this forum could probably drive by and recognize my garden. If a pedophile is lurking here, they could see my kids and perhaps figure out where I live. That does concern me somewhat, but I watch my kids like a hawk, and I think that a true pedophile has many more extensive and disgusting sources of phtos than my baby butt garden pics. I can't help but share pics of my garden and my kids, they are my biggest sources of pride and I just love to share. I know I am naive but I feel in my heart that most if not all gardeners are good folks. I trust this forum and I feel safe here. As for my grow list: I am going to try to grow Nematode Resistant plants when possible. I am scaling back this year as far as varieties for this reason. I am currently on a seed hunt for: Pole Beans: Poamoho or Alabama No 1 Bush Beans Monoa Wonder or Harvester Lima Bean Nemagreen Bell pepper charleston belle or carolina wonder Wando Peas My herbs, lettuces, spinach etc don't seem affected by RKN so I will again grow tons of them. I hope to grow around 20 Nematode resistant tomatoes (assorted). I cannot find any nematode resistant cucs, squash, or soybeans, so I am unsure what I will do for those or if I will just skip them this year. I'd also love to grow carrots and beets but last year both were a complete failure (tiny stunted crop). Jo

Paula, FYI, a lot of those ornamental peppers reseed for me. That's one thing about them that I really like. Dody, That should be my slogan "So many choices, so little room", and I should cross stitch it onto a sampler to hang in my potting shed. Charlie, You're welcome. Ask and ye shall receive. Going through the list and researching all those varieties might take you a little while, but it is something to do in the "off season". Chandra, Oh, no, that's not the list of what I'm growing in 2011. It is just the list of my personal favorites. They've become favorites because they tolerate our weather and produce well. After I posted the list of OSU-recommended varieties, Charlie wanted to know what it is that people "really" plant though, so I posted the list so he'd know what I, for one, like to plant. I mean no disrespect towards the OSU-recommended varieties, or the varieties recomended by any other university, like Texas A&M, for example. Even when I lived in Texas, I looked at their list and then made my own choices. While the varieties recommended by the various universities for their areas have been researched, often the research is done more on hybrids than OPs, and often productivity or shelf life gets as much attention as flavor, for example. Remember that university research sometimes is geared more towards commercial farmers than home gardeners. So, I try to choose varieties for our specific home garden that tolerate our weather, produce a worthwhile yield and also, those whose flavor we prefer. Where to find them? Almost everything I listed should be available from one or two or more of the following online sources, or at least they have been in the past. In a couple of cases, there's only one or two sources, and I've listed it below. The websites are my best guess and if I'm off by a letter or two, you can find them by googling. Victory Seeds (victoryseed.com) Willhite Seed (willhiteseed.com) Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (southernexposure.com) Seed Savers Exchange (seedsavers.net) Baker Creek Rare Seeds (rareseeds.com) Totally Tomatoes (totallytomatoes.com) Tomato Growers Supply Company (tomatogrowers.com) Ramapo tomato is available directly from Rutgers/NJAES. Moreton is also available there. I believe Little Lucy okra is available from a couple of places, and one of them is Park Seed. Baby Bubba is available from Burpee. Moreton and Supersonic tomato seed are available from Harris Seed. I get seed potatoes locally, from organic grocery stores in the DFW metroplex and from Ronningers, which has a new website you can find by googling. I'm not sure the new website is completely functional yet. I get my onion plants from Dixondale Farms and recommend them highly. If you are in the OKC-Norman metro area or in the Tulsa metro area, you may find all those same varieties locally, but I can't find all of them here in southern OK. Almost all the tomato and pepper varieties I listed are available from either Tomato Growers Supply or Totally Tomatoes if you don't find them on the websites of the other seed companies. Biker Billy Jalapeno, though, is from Burpee so only available from Burpee and its sister companies. Dawn