Johnny, I love crowder peas and think Americans should eat more of them. They're just as strong and resilient in our worst heat and drought as the more popular southern peas like pink eye purple hulls, zipper, lady and cream peas but just try finding any fresh ones in the grocery story in the summer----it isn't going to happen! So, we grow our own. I do wonder if there is some inherent bias against them because a lot of them are dark in color and also cook up a dark "gravy" when cooked. (Cornbread exists to soak up the gravy, does it not?) I also think their crowded, sort of smushed-in, sometimes dimpled appearance is not as appealing to some folks as the more normal-looking other types of southern peas. This kind of reminds me of the way some people don't like cutshort beans because they look "funny". I always suggest they just taste them instead of hating on them because they don't look "right". Nothing ever will take the place of crowders in my garden, although my favorite southern peas likely always will be Pink Eye Purple Hull. I could plant only PEPH varieties and be happy, but do try to add a crowder, lady, zipper or cream pea to my list every year. I like watching for some of the more obscure ones at Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Heavenly Seed, Willhite Seed or Baker Creek Heirloom Seed. I'm not sure about the others, but I know Willhite and SESE sell bulk seed of their various southern peas for folks with larger gardens. I like my southern peas of all types harvested green, so I spend an inordinate amount of time in the summer sitting with a bowl of southern peas in my lap shelling them. (It takes me back to my childhood and evenings spent sitting on the front porch shelling peas with the porch light on and moths crashing into the screen door while seeking the light.) If I liked the southern peas in their drier stage, I'd buy a pea sheller and leave them on the plants longer and harvest them when they were dry enough to go through the sheller without being smashed/crushed to death. A Farmer's Market near my hometown always had a pea sheller running on weekends, shelling any sort of southern pea that a shopper had just purchased. To me, a sheller is one of those old-timey southern farm things that is disappearing in this day and age when so many people just buy canned or dry southern peas in packages at the store. If I was growing southern peas for a food bank, I'd grow crowders for sure, and I'd harvest them after they were dry enough for the sheller to shell them. I don't know of anything that gives a better return in the dead of summer than all types of southern peas, including crowders. Depending on what sort of soil they're growing in and how well it holds moisture, you often don't even have to water them at all. Even in 2011, my southern peas produced well, given the circumstances, which at our house (and at many others in OK that year) included no rainfall for almost 3 months and high temperatures over 100 degrees for around 90-100 consecutive days. They did wilt when we were hitting 110-115 every day, but so did everything else, including this gardener. Do y'all grow crowders for the food bank? I think they would be an important part of your crop rotation, especially since you can just rototill the spent plants into the ground for soil improvement after the harvest is over. Oh, I guess harvesting tons of them by hand would be labor intensive, but so are a lot of other crops. Usually, when I harvest southern peas, I don't process the different types separately. I just shell them all together and cook them and eat them all together. I do the same thing with snap peas and shellies. I like having diversity on my dinner plate. Some folks don't like to mix together all their peas, but I grow too many different varieties for me to sit there and harvest them and shell them and process them all separately. I'd never sleep. Remember, too, that all southern peas can be used to make pea hull jelly, which is one of those wonderful, tasty jellies that people cannot believe came from a waste product like pea hulls. My favorite, though, is from Pink Eye Purple Hulls. I've never made pea hull jelly from crowders as I generally grow less of them. I grow all of my vining type southern peas on the garden fences, so I occasionally lose a pea pod or leaf here or there to the nibbling deer, but not as often as a person would think. My favorite way to plant vining types of southern peas is to leave the last harvest on the vines and to leave the vines on the fences all winter long. When I yank down the spent vines at soil preparation time, the remaining pods split open and the peas fall to the ground. The next season's crop just pops up on its own without any planting action on my part. I've kept Red Ripper peas going for years that way, and hope to do the same with the calico crowders. We'll see if the pine voles allow that. Last year they ate the roots of every type of bush southern pea I grew, at the rate of one plant per night beginning some time in July. They preferred PEPHs to all others, and their favorite was Mackey. They ate all of my Mackey plants before they moved on to other varieties. They didn't bother Red Ripper or Colossus at all. Dawn

I started a cookbook book club here three years ago. Our first meeting, we all brought appetizers and the book it came from. We then signed up to host each month and developed our rules after a couple of trials and errors as far as main dish was concerned. The rules are simple: The hostess selects the "theme" (theme being used loosely as it CAN be theme (like Italian), or it can be a particular chef (like Lidia) or it can be a region (like Sicilian). The hostess also provides the entree and on a rotating basis we all bring one item: appetizer, salad, starch, vegetable, bread and dessert. We have enough members that except for starch and bread, we have two of everything else so whatever the hostess was supposed to bring we just skip that. We have decided to limit membership to 10 because of space when hosting. We've done lots of interesting meals -- the last one being "Any Mediterranean Country but Greece" and this month's will be Backyard BBQ. We have cooked from one cookbook but our goal is NOT to make members buy a book so instead of one cookbook (like Cooking for Jeffrey by Ina Garden) we tend to just say "Barefoot Contessa" because you can find recipes on line. The one thing that we try to do is not to bring anything "tried and true" -- I've cooked a lot from Barefoot Contessa but if she were our theme, I would pick out a recipe that I've never made before!

Jack, Your list is nice and be careful or you'll fall into my trap of planting more garden than you can maintain/defend against wildlife and pests. Believe me, cutting this grow list is absolutely, positively the hardest thing I've ever done garden-wise. I am not exaggerating when I say how very painful it was and is. It has caused tossing and turning and sleepless nights, lying awake wondering how I will "survive" without 50 varieties of tomatoes, remembering the great experimental years when I grew 300 tomato varieties (600 plants) in one year in an effort to see how they did in head-to-head competition. (This was only possible because deer hadn't found our garden yet as many of these plants were outside the fenced garden itself. It also was, ironically, the year the deer found the garden, naturally, and started eating tomato plants.) Ever since we moved here, my gardening motto has kinda been "go big or go home". However, there's just the two of us now and we can eat only so much produce. Of course a person always can give away the excess, but if you raise lots of excess produce, you even put lots of time into growing, harvesting it, washing it, sorting it and bagging it up just to give away. I want to spend that time more productively on projects here at home. Even when I can, freeze and dehydrate all the excess for us, all I'm doing is filling up pantries and freezers with more food than we can eat. If you keep preserving more food than you can eat every year, after a while you have quite a surplus in storage. I work hard to rotate the oldest stored canned and frozen goods so that the oldest stuff is eaten first and the newest stuff last, but that's also a ton of work that involves keeping the deep freezes (we have 3 of them) really, really well-organized. I've been working really hard the last few years to more closely align what we preserve with how much we eat, though I still like to preserve two years of food each year---so if there is a total garden failure in any give year (it's never happened, but you never know) then there's still a year's worth of yummy home-grown food stored away. So, it is time to cut back even more. I have to have the mindset that what I grow and preserve this year will be enough for us, but not too much, and I cannot focus on the stuff I'm not able to grow. That opens up the door to have more space for flowers. I used to grow a lot more flowers than I have in recent years, but the veggies kept pushing them out. This year, it is a return to many more flowers. True pumpkins have zero chance of surviving here with all the squash vine borers---we always have two generations of them and sometimes 3 or 4. I'm just so tired of fighting them. I'm thinking that if I take off a year or two, maybe the SVBs will die out in my neighborhood. Before they found us, I grew 15-30 varieties of true pumpkins every year and had such a wonderful time doing it (and not even in the real garden, but out in the 10' wide strip of grass between our driveway and the southern property line....with me having to go drag wayward vines out of the driveway occasionally and direct their growth back towards the fenceline), but then the SVBs arrived, and everything changed. I think the SVBs didn't find us until our 7th year here. I do not know a single person in my county who grows true pumpkins (or summer squash) organically without the use of synthetic pesticides. I suppose I could just make life easy on myself by planting those true pumpkins and summer squash in their own garden away from the other two gardens and then spray them regularly with synthetic pesticides, and we'd have a great non-organic harvest of them, right? But, I find it nearly impossible to even contemplate doing that. I'd rather not ever use a synthetic pesticide even if it means giving up pumpkins. Oh, and my whole no-pumpkin plan is somewhat in danger because Lillie mentioned she loves pumpkins and have I ever grown the blue ones? I told her yes and the pink ones too, so of course, she's hoping I'll find a place to grow them. I need to have my head examined for even discussing pumpkins with that sweet child. I'm toying with the ideal of building a high tunnel, maybe 10' x 12', back in the back garden and covering it with Biothrips Proteknetting instead of plastic, and planting blue and pink pumpkins inside it for Lillie but I'm not going to tell her about that idea until the high tunnel gets built (if it gets built). Even then, we still have the vole issue so could go to all the trouble to try to exclude squash pest and still have voles eat the plant roots and kill the plants. We couldn't grow many pumpkins in a space that small, but for her, even 1 or 2 plants of the blue and the pink would be better than nothing. Sweet potatoes? I know I don't have them on my list. Every now and then I skip growing them because of space issues. What usually happens when I 'think' I am skipping them for one year is that I walk into Mike's Garden Center one day in May and see the 4 or 6 or 8 varieties of slips that they have, and then I impulsively buy some slips and find a way to shoehorn them into the garden. Last year I grew them in a regular bed, not one lined with hardware cloth, and I got away with it and the voles didn't eat them. That's a rarity. Maybe I'll find a spot to try that again this year because my hardware-cloth lined beds already will have taters, carrots and other things in them. The problem with all root crops is that we have billions, possibly trillions of pine voles living in our woodland. Usually they stay there until it gets hot and dry and food starts getting scarce--so generally early July. When that happens, they flock to the garden and eat every living thing that has some sort of fleshy tuber or root underground (or at/slightly above grade level)---sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, onions, leeks, the bulbing form of fennel, carrots, radishes, turnips, beets, tulips (but not daffodils), dahlias, lilies, daylilies, ornmental sweet potatoes and virtually every other flower that has any sort of bulb or tuber for a root except I don't remember them ever eating glads. After they devour all that stuff, they start in on the root systems of fruit trees (and sometimes non-fruiting trees) and black berries. Still hungry? They start eating the roots of cucumbers, southern peas, watermelons and pumpkins. Honestly, sometimes it is a wonder that we are able to grow anything at all and get a harvest before the voles kill the plants. Other years the voles stay out of the garden. You never know what kind of year it is going to be. I have three small raised beds completely lined in hardware cloth where I can grow root crops, but there's never enough room in those beds for everything---so it means I have to make hard choices. This year I choose carrots over sweet potatoes, but there's always a chance that I'll be able to squeeze in a late sweet potato planting to succeed the carrots. So, cool-season root crops usually get to mature before voles show up but I plant them in hardware cloth-lined beds because some years the voles show up at planting time (maybe in a hard winter?) and eat all the seed potatoes as soon as I plant them if they aren't in the hardware cloth-lined bed. Warm-season root crops have a lot more vole trouble because the voles get hungrier in the summer once the heat decimates their usual food supply. In the worst drought years, the voles even have devoured the roots of lantana, moss rose and zinnias. They also love herbs, especially (for whatever reason) lemon balm. They've never bothered garlic or asparagus though. And, yes, I've tried all the castor oil based repellents and I think all they do is make the voles reproduce more babies more quickly. I've tried growing a border of castor bean plants along the garden fenceline---from the way some of those seeds 'moved' after they were sown, I think the voles dug up the beans I had planted and carried them around and moved them into new spots before they sprouted----and we still had voles destroy the garden plants anyway. If I were starting over with a brand new garden here, knowing what I know now about the voles, and if money were no object, I would have poured gravel 6" deep (or even poured concrete) over the entire garden plot, and then built raised beds on top of the gravel/concrete with each and every bed fully lined in hardware cloth. The problem with hardware cloth is that eventually it rusts and corrodes and needs to be replaced when it is used underground in the garden. I'm dreading the day when that happens to just the three small beds lined with it because it will involve moving a ton of dirt to replace the hardware cloth and we're getting older and less fond of heavy digging every year. And, yes, the voles do tunnel through the gravel driveway sometimes, just to show me they can, but I still think a gravel-based garden would have less vole trouble. So, root crops are limited by necessity. The kinds of flowers, fruit and berries I grow are limited by whatever the voles' appetites are in any given year. I'll never plant a fruit tree again without burying a hardware cloth root cage around the root system to at least give the tree a chance to make enough roots to survive the voles in its early years. I believe the voles are one reason we have so many snakes come into the garden. The cats control field mice and rats pretty well. Pumpkin does his best to control the voles, but there's so many of them that he gets tired of playing with them and gives up by mid-summer. The older cats just ignore the voles with a "been there, done that" attitude. Bobcats got into the garden almost daily and controlled the voles (though at the time, I did not realize that's why they were there because the voles hadn't become a garden problem yet since the bobcats were controlling them) when the garden had only a 4' tall fence. When we raised the fence to 8' to exclude the deer, it also excluded the bobcats. So, my choice appears to be a garden with a 4' fence and no voles and with bobcats but with tons of deer damage, or a garden with an 8' fence, no bobcats and no deer damage, but tons of vole damage. What's a gardener to do? So, those are the challenges I face, and that's the reason certain veggies (and many kinds of flowers) fall off the grow list. I love where we live. I expected wildlife. I might not have expected as much wildlife as we have though. With the Red River to our west, south and east, and tons of Wildlife Management Land along the river, we have such huge numbers of wildlife that sometimes it can be mind-boggling. In drought years it almost becomes dangerous here as the wildlife gets hungry and more aggressive---you do not, for example, want to encounter a bunch of hungry feral hogs ever. Even the deer have stalked me at times because they are hungry, and sometimes they will stand outside the garden fence and blow air through their nostrils trying to scare me out of the garden, or will stand outside the fence, stare at me and stomp their feet trying to scare me out of my own garden. I always, always, always must be mindful to close the garden gate behind me when I enter the garden and to securely latch the gate closed----it isn't fun to have even a little skunk come wandering into the fenced garden while you're in there...and that is why my garden has two gates! Truthfully, when the deer are that aggressive, I'd rather go into the house, but that means leaving the safety of the enclosed garden and walking about 100' in an open area with the deer right there....so I yell back at the deer, tell them to go away, throw things at them, etc. and after they leave, I go indoors. We won't even get into talk of the cougar year when the sudden appearance of cougars at my garden gate in mid- to late- summer caused me to start carrying a long gun instead of just a hand gun out to the garden with me....and for weeks I was so scared that I hardly went into the garden for any reason except to harvest and then I'd take two big dogs with me. Big dogs trample gardens, so I was sort of choosing the lesser of two evils at that point. Personally, I'm more in favor of gun-free gardening, but not willing to move back to the city to make it a reality. : ) As more people move here to our rural area slowly over the years (near us, but usually not between us and the river), it just seems to push more wildlife towards us, especially if they clearcut the woodland areas on their property. More wildlife is just more trouble for me and my garden. If I ever build a new garden spot, we will either build a deck of pressure-treated lumber or pour a huge concrete slab and then I'll have an Earthbox garden right outside the back door with a hard surface beneath it that might keep the garden vole-free and snake-free. That's my dream retirement garden, but we'd have to fence the side yard to make it happen....and Tim hates fencing. Still, I expect I'll get my way and have this retirement garden built after he retires in a few more years. Okay, my rant about what I can and can't do is over. Everything I've learned I cannot do here because of the wildlife absolutely was learned the hard way by having wildlife destroy what I planted over and over again, so I've learned to focus instead on what I can do. That means that some root crops don't make the list in any given year and many forms of flowers that have tuberous or bulbous roots are off the grow list permanently. Some years I get so tired of fighting squash bugs even on regular squash and C. moschata types of winter squash that I swear I am never, ever again going to plant squash but then I plant it anyway. One of these days, I'll skip all squash for a year and y'all will think I've completely lost my mind. It's okay. I don't expect anyone who has never had these sorts of garden challenges to understand that a gardener can only fight that war so many times on so many fronts before they decide that gardening shouldn't be a war and just give up on that particular crop. Dawn

Yeah, I took tumeric in pretty high levels trying to alleviate an inflammatory skin condition. It didn't work. I decided that just using it as a seasoning was probably good enough and a whole lot less money . . . Hubs always says that nothing works on me, but most herbal supplements don't. Which is kind of a shame because I love plants and I love using plant products, but so far, herbalism has been mostly a bust for me. At least for anything major. Ginger good for tummy and chamomile and mint relaxing, etc. but nothing has worked for the more chronic and serious conditions. But I don't consider herbal medicines totally benign or devoid of dosage concerns. That goes for vitamins too, they can cause a lot of toxicity if you aren't taking dosage into consideration. Vitamin A is one of the best known culprits. You can also pee away a lot of money that way too . . .