Johnny, All of that is marvelous news. Congrats on the successful harvest! Dawn

Dorothy, It has worked for a long time. Maybe for 7 or 8 years now. I've never once had a deer jump it, but on the rare occasion that I've left the gate open at night (OOPS!), I have come outside in the early morning around sunrise and found deer in the garden. Because they saw me (and even though I quickly retreated indoors to avoid frightening them), they wouldn't leave though the gate, and did manage by repeatedly jumping to eventually get over the top of the fence from inside the garden. They did a lot of damage during their mad stampede of running around wildly inside the garden trying repeatedly to jump the fence. I learned a lesson then about double-checking the gate at night to make sure it was closed and firmly latched. Everyone I know here has had success with an 8' fence, but I know that in some parts of the country, it takes a 10' fence. Some years I have had deer loitering just outside the garden fence repeatedly, sometimes even when they could clearly see me inside the garden (Hint: always close the gate behind yourself or you may find a deer coming in through the gate while you're inside the garden, and guess how I know that). I felt like those deer absolutely were planning to jump the 8' fence and I was worried they might succeed, so I tied white Wal-mart bags to the fence at roughly a deer eye level. I think any white material would work, it is just that at that point in time, white Wal-Mart bags were what I had. I tied them every 6' or 8'. They were tied so that they would flutter in the breeze. Because white-tailed deer use their white tails to signal danger to one another, I was hoping white fluttering bags would send a "Danger! Flee!" signal to any deer contemplating jumping the fence. It seemed to work. Those loitering deer went away. I thought that maybe one reason my 8' fence worked in the front garden was because the woodland comes up almost to the fence on two sides (north and west) and the driveway is on the south side, with the barbed wire property line fence just a few feet south of the driveway. I figured that at least on those three sides, deer found it hard to get a running start to leap an 8' fence. The east side had no real obstructions, but it slopes downhill which might discourage jumping the fence from that side. When we built the new back garden three years ago, we put up a sturdier woven wire fence than we have in the front garden. We used landscape timbers for poles and a very heavy gauge woven wire fencing material. That garden has wide-open land on all sides and I was worried deer would jump that fence because several deer trails run though that area. They've never made it over that 8' fence and into the garden, and I've never even seen any sign that they've tried. I've also noticed that the professional game/hunting ranches both here in our county and across the Red River in Montague County, TX, have 8' high fences, so they must find that the 8' high fences keep their deer contained within. However, those game ranches mostly have heavy timber along the fence lines and that might help keep their deer from jumping since the trees are so close to their fences. Dawn

Johnny, Well, my mouth is watering too, and whatever breakfast I choose to have this morning will pale in comparison to the vision (pun intended) in my mind of the meal y'all are going to serve to the supporters of Vision Farms. How wonderful it is that y'all have access to a commercial kitchen! Amy, My mom and all my relatives fried lots of everything, but we always also had salad at every dinner and generally 2 or more vegetables, and other than fried okra or french fries, the veggies were rarely fried. It is, of course, a requirement in our family that okra be fried or over-roasted. Sometimes my dad would fry up a delicious dish that had no name. It really consisted of whatever he could bring in from the garden that day, but my favorite combination was when he fried together sliced or diced potatoes, sliced okra, diced peppers and either sliced or diced onions. He'd fry it in bacon and other meat drippings (saved in a metal canister that sat on the counter and said "GREASE" on it, lol,) in a cast iron skillet and would chop up a couple of slices of bacon and cook that with the fried veggies. Then, when it was more than half-way cooked, he'd randomly scatter a couple of handfuls of corn meal over the pan of frying veggies, and stir-fry it with them. A plateful of this fried veggie concoction was a meal in itself and you really didn't even need to prepare a meat dish to go with it. Although.....it was especially delicious if you also had a bowl of either red pinto beans or pink eye purple hull peas and a slice of hot, buttered cornbread to eat with it. My dad would grin broadly and say "that's good eating!". We probably ate a typical southern diet when I was a kid, but my mom was not all that crazy about cooking so her idea of cooking veggies was to open a can or green beans or corn or carrots and dump them into a saucepan to heat them up. It was my dad who'd make everything from scratch on the weekends, and he'd cook southern style veggies, whether fresh from the garden or from a market grower that had a market garden about 1.5 miles from our house, and he'd cook them in a way that made you drool. Tim and I fried food early in our married years, but really cut back on the frying over the years so that we eat a fairly healthy diet now. We eat a lot of grilled meat and lots of homegrown veggies and fruit, and largely avoid fast food for the most part. Chris doesn't eat as healthy in general as we do and he eats more fast food, but being a firefighter who cooks at work, he is a great cook and knows many healthy ways of preparing food. He fights hard to get the guys at his station to eat in a more healthy way, but most of them are not nearly as much into healthy eating as he is. I feel fortunate that I grew up with grandparents who gardened and farmed and prepared food from scratch always and forever, and with many aunts and uncles who did the same. Any and every family gathering was chock full of every dish imaginable, and I've never seen a family chow down on pickled food (they'd pickle and eat anything and everything) like my dad's family did. It wasn't until I was an adult, probably already in my 30s, that I finally understood that the reason pickled foods played such a large role in their meals was that back during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression years, his large farm family canned all their own food, and pickling was one of the safer methods in use then, so they developed a real appreciation for pickled stuff. I finally understood why you might see 10 different kinds of pickled foods on a holiday table. I assume each of the now-adult kids was bringing their favorite kind of pickled vegetable, and it was always the two sisters who made sure that no two families were bringing the same thing in order to avoid duplication. I used to wonder why we had pickled everything when I was was kid, but I understand it better now. No one on this earth (including me) can fry a chicken that is as good as the fried chicken my mom cooked in a cast iron skillet when we were children, and believe me, I have tried to replicate it many times. She really didn't like cooking and used lots of convenience foods as they became available in the 1960s (she thought those little TV dinners in aluminum pans were the bomb!), but no one could cook better fried chicken. It is just that she didn't cook it nearly often enough! One reason I love edible gardening so much is that it makes me feel closer to the older generations that went before us. When I am sitting and snapping beans or shelling peas, or when I am cooking them or we are eating them, I feel so very connected to all the relatives who taught us to cook (largely by example) and to preserve the garden bounty when we were young. I can still hear my grandmother's voice reciting whatever she had done on a given day. She'd say something like "I put up 6 quarts of green beans and then I did 9 quarts of beets......" and I still can hear those words in my mind as clear as day even though she's been gone for almost two decades. Now, I'm the one reciting to my family or friends, telling them how many pints or quarts of this or that that I've put up that day or that week. It is a continuity in our family that I like. Kim, Well, you led a deprived life. Oh my! I grew up on cornbread and cannot imagine life without it. My dad's favorite meal, and one we had every single Wednesday (I don't know why it was always on Wednesdays) for my entire childhood was red beans cooked in a pot on the stove with chopped onions and chopped up bacon in them, some sort of boiled greens---turnip, mustard, spinach, collards, etc., and cornbread. He always had a bottle of pepper-flavored vinegar that he sprinkled on his beans, which he referred to as "pepper sauce", and I think he happily would have eaten this meal 5 or 6 days a week even though it was simple food. I probably was in high school before I learned that some people ate fish that wasn't fried, or at least baked in the oven like fish sticks. To this day, in my mind, the only way to eat catfish is breaded in cornmeal and fried. Tim was teased a lot about being a transplanted Texan back in the 1980s and 1990s. Eventually he lost his Yankee accent and could pass as a native Texan, but he always told people "I wasn't born in Texas but I got here as soon as I could". When we got engaged, I only agreed to marry him after he promised me that he'd never ask me to leave Texas. I wanted to be sure he wouldn't up and decide to move back to the Yankee land of snow and cold weather and short growing seasons after we got married, because I had absolutely no desire to live anywhere that the cold months outnumber the warm ones. When we began to tire of city living and began to discuss moving to the country to get away from the rat race of living in a large metro area, I was the one who suggested we look for land in southern Oklahoma, which still felt much more rural back then than adjacent areas of Texas. He was shocked that I'd consider leaving my home state, but I found the people here to be every bit as wonderful as the Texans I'd grown up with, and many fewer Yankees had infiltrated Oklahoma back then, but Texas was overrun with them. Oklahoma was the perfect solution for us. Dawn

I've not tried potatoes yet, but it's interesting that both of you had such luck with store bought potatoes. Now I need to try. I'm still harvesting kale and Romaine, but they started to bolt in the last week. Spinach bolted a couple weeks ago. Zucchini and yellow squash are really starting to produce; I've had four or five of each so far. We had our first cucumber this weekend. Lots of tiny green tomatoes, but it'll be a while for them. Onions are getting really close. Enjoy those new potatoes. Michelle