Yes, it's an Allium imo too.

Last spring, for the first time, I planted allium bulbs. As much as I love the allium flowers, I find the seed-heads even more fascinating. I've been cutting them and strewing them about the garden. Does anyone out there know how long they will last? Is there any way of preserving them so they will last longer? If they are stable, why don't I see them in weird little shoppes, like the ones that sell twisted plant limbs and dried lotus blossoms and mammal skeletons (Paxton Gate)? Have I stumbled across a potential source of income? A book? Allium skeletons, anyone? K

Josh, I simply put the pitchers in my freezer until they were dry. It takes a month or more, depending on the size and thickness of the pitchers being dried. Some types of pitchers hold their color and some don't. Sarracenia will hold their color for a couple of months after drying, and then turn brown. The large pitcher with the bright burgundy color is spray painted. The Humbolt site is a bit slow to navagate. You have to click on each link to get an image. There are many links and it takes quite a while to just download the lists of each genera you want to look at. Steve

In the legume family, in general dried beans are higher in protein than dried peas. I think soybeans are the highest,followed by lentils, followed by dried beans in general (black beans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans, etc.) and then by dried peas. In the pea category, dried southern peas (blackeyes, pinkeye purplehulls, zipper peas, crowder peas, etc.) are a little higher in protein than dried green peas (English peas, etc.). It goes without saying that any bean or pea harvested and eaten as a snap bean or as a edible podded pea or as a shelly green bean or pea has less protein than those grown to maturity and harvested dry because at the green stage they have not yet fully developed the proteins that will develop before you harvest them as dried peas/beans. I've grown most of the bean varieties offered by SESE but I grow them as snap beans or as shelly beans(particularly lima beans) at the green stage but not as dried beans, and they produce just fine in spring and fall, but most flower and set beans poorly in mid-summer because the heat impedes their pollination. Pretty much any bean variety I ever have grown, excluding runner beans which also have trouble in high heat, will produce well with only minimal irrigation as long as the temperatures don't go too far above about 90 degrees. At 90 degrees, blossom drop often becomes a problem. I don't grow beans or peas to the dried bean or pea stage because both are so inexpensive to buy in bulk at the grocery store that it does not make any logical sense to me to devote a lot of garden space to growing them and then devote a lot of time to shelling them, only to have a relatively small harvest as a result. When you grow beans to the dry stage, you are discarding the dry pods and keeping the dry beans/peas and it is amazing how a big bucket of bean or pea pods gives you relatively few peas/beans (by weight or volume) once shelled compared to all the empty, dried pods you throw on the compost pile. I don't like spending all that time growing and harvesting them only to keep 5% of the plant to eat while composting the rest, but that's just me. I simply like the maximum production from the soil we've spent years improving, and raising beans or peas to the dry stage gives us a smaller harvest overall than harvesting them and eating them as snap peas or snap beans, although the same harvest if eating them as green shellies. Drought tolerance is in the eyes of the beholder to a certain extent because there are many kinds of drought. Beans or peas that grow and produce well in moderate or severe drought might not grow and produce nearly as well once your area advances to extreme or exceptional drought. The beans that have produced best for me in periods of extreme or exceptional drought are Rattlesnake, Worchester Indian Red Lima and Violet's Multicolored Butter Beans. All southern peas produce very well in heat and drought. Dawn