 Greetings, everyone. My name is Doug Chapman. I'm a regional extension agent in North Alabama. I work with commercial horticulture and what I wanted to talk to you about today is just some vegetables that I consider to be heirloom vegetables. These are regional favorites. They are grown here in the southeast for a reason and I'll try to explain some of that as we go along. But you know, we have a different climate here. It's very hot and humid during the summertime and a lot of the traditional vegetables that are grown in some other parts of the world just don't perform really very well here and it's because of our climate. Now as we go along I'll try to think of some questions that you might have and try to answer them as we go. So with that said we'll go ahead and jump off into this. I was fortunate enough to be born during a time that was just after World War II and the Korean War and the neighborhood I grew up in was almost every house there was a World War I, World War II or Korean War veteran and all of these people grew up during the depression. They knew what hard times were but in a lot of respects times had been really hard in the south for a long time but my point to all this is that everybody had a garden and I mean everybody grew something. This is a picture that I actually took in 1964. This might have been my first camera that I ever had but Mr. T. A. Perkins is standing there by his garden that Mr. Bill Anders has just broken up for him and so as you can tell this is in the springtime there's not very many leaves on the trees yet and so he's getting ready to plant. Mr. Perkins was a really good neighbor. He and his wife both and they they grew up during some really hard times and one of the few people that I knew that actually had a root cellar. I remember going down in it and it was covered in glass and it was just a pit that had been dug out and they kept canned vegetables and some things down in there but by the time I came along that had we had started using freezers a lot. You know people had gotten electricity as you can see from the utility lines here and so times were changing a little bit but people still live the way they remembered how to live and that was during some really hard times. Now just take a good look at this photo here and I'm going to show you what this area looked like back in the 1920s on another slide a little bit later on. One of the vegetables that we were able to grow here in the South was a sweet potato and the sweet potatoes were grown in South and Central America and in the Caribbean and they just kind of moved up into North America as well I guess pre-Columbian times actually and then by the time the Europeans and the Africans started arriving we started growing them here just because it was a really well-adapted vegetable. Sweet potatoes are a lot more nutritious than Irish potatoes and they don't get as many diseases. The edible structure of the sweet potato is actually botanically a root whereas the edible structure of a Irish potato is called a tuber but we've done some genetic studies on sweet potato in recent years and we are now not too terribly sure that sweet potatoes didn't originate in Asia somehow and how they made it to South America and parts of the Pacific we are really unsure of at this time. Really heat tolerant vegetable you really don't even plant these until you know about late May early June they do fairly well on poor soil but you always get a response when you apply potassium to the soil for sweet potatoes now the way sweet potatoes are grown you will actually do what's called bed these roots in a bed and this generally covered in salt dust or something like that on outside and then you'll get a lot of sprouting from these roots they will send up adventitious shoots and as those shoots grow up through that salt dust or media or bark or whatever it is you put them in they will start to form roots and as they emerge you can go in there and harvest those shoots which are called slips and you can take them to the field and plant them and they'll just just grow and do really well you can also also grow them from vine cuttings you take the cuttings and stick them in the ground and they'll root in two days so let's move on a little bit sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family as you can see by this bloom they do bloom occasionally and the flowers are actually if they get pollinated they will actually result in true seed since sweet potatoes are vegetatively propagated there's not a lot of variation at all when you know if you bed the potatoes that you grew last year and get the slips or the vine cuttings you'll have the same sweet potatoes you grew last year so the only way to get a different kind of sweet potato or improve the sweet potato is through the flowers and through control crosses or chant seedlings but keep in mind that true seed is produced in the flowers but we we don't use true seed to plant sweet potatoes we we plant the slips and harvest roots when Booker T. Washington came to Macon County Alabama to start Tuskegee Institute the average sweet potato yield in Macon County was about 45 bushels per acre nowadays farmers that that are doing this for a living are reaching yields somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 to 500 bushels per acre so we really made some really good advances we've got some disease resistance bred into the sweet potato crop now it's a really good good crop for some parts of the state most of our sweet potato production now is in the Coleman area and down in the Baldwin County area so north and south like I said they are more nutritious than our potatoes they're easier to grow they very versatile the sweet potato was used to here as a pie base instead of pumpkins where up north you had pumpkin pie in the fall well here in the southeast you use the sweet potato for the same thing and a family story that I remember being told that my grandfather who was say World War one veteran grew up on a farm down in Hale County Alabama and the sweet potatoes came in one year and apparently it was a really good year and they they really did well and my great grandmother baked a whole sweet potato pie for every member of the family so when they came in for supper that night there was a whole sweet potato pie sitting at the table where everybody sat down and she it just really tickled her to see the reaction with everybody so you know it was just that's and I'm gonna share some other family stories coming along as we go through this the varieties that we grow commercially now are things like Evangeline Covington and Beauregard some of the older varieties like Jewel and Puerto Rico you can find those still through some plant supply places and we do have a list of sweet potato supply you know sweet potato plant suppliers so anyway one interesting thing about sweet potatoes USDA maintains a seed bank throughout the United States and and some of the territories and dependencies around and they have a they have a collection of sweet potatoes I think it numbers up into the thousands of different varieties that they have but they are stored you know you've got a perishable root there so if you're going to store something you need you need to you know make sure that it's not perishable but the way they store the sweet potatoes is in test tubes they grow them in vitro that's just a big name for growing plants and test tubes so when you order a sweet potato variety from them for breeding purposes or whatever they will have to take that out of the test tubes and grow the slips for you and that's the way they send them to you is little small vine cuttings and I have ordered a few like that before but hadn't done it lately all right let's move on to another plant that is very widely grown in the south and probably not very popular in any other parts of the country unless you've got people that grew up in the south and have moved somewhere else they will grow okra where they where they've gone to just because they know what to do with it okra is a very warm season member of the hibiscus family and we eat the immature pods that's that's what we eat it's native to Ethiopia and we think maybe India okra is one of the most productive vegetables I think you can grow because it will start bearing and will will continue to bear all summer long and the only thing that will stop it from bearing is when you get a freeze in the fall and that just kills the plant and you know you'll have to start over but you need to have really warm soil before you plant the okra seed it is a hibiscus and so you know you'd plant it maybe after you planted some of the other earlier vegetables we've actually got some really good hybrid okra now that's just where they've gone in and done some selective braiding one of the ones that we've grown here in Alabama's jambalaya there was also one called Cajun Delight we've grown Zara and Gumbo Gumbo is actually an African word it means okra and you know it's kind of interesting we got a lot of words from Africa you know the I don't know if you've ever thought about it but you know peanuts sometimes you you hear peanuts called goober peas well goober or guba is an African word for peanut and although peanuts are native to South America they got they made their way to Africa at some point in time and then when the the African Americans were brought over as slaves they brought okra with them and and their language the old varieties of okra that we used to grow like well we still grow Clemson spineless and and some of these other ones cowhorn there's a red velvet okra that would grow Clemson spineless is is an open pollinated you can actually save seed from from these open pollinated varieties but Clemson spineless is 60 days from from planting till harvest whereas something like jambalaya or Zara is 48 days so you know you can plant early and get your plants out as soon as you can and maybe have okra before anybody else has okra with these with these hybrids and if you we've got some people that are trying it by growing it starting it in a greenhouse and plant planting it out in a high tunnel very early in the spring you know way earlier than you would normally plant it but since they're in that protected structure they're having okra you know sometimes six weeks before anybody else has it and fresh okra you can just about name your price and the restaurants are able to buy it and so when everybody else's okra starts coming in and you can cut yours down and go do something else you've already made your money so that's just kind of interesting fact about how we do these hybrids we we grew these hybrid side-by-side one year at the experiment station at Belmina and as you can see here on the first picture on the left you can see how much more vigorous and earlier the jambalaya is compared to the Clemson spineless similarly the picture on the right is Zara by by Clemson spineless it is also early to emerge and maybe we'll germinate a little better little cooler soil that could be one of the reasons it's so much earlier but it is really interesting to see the contrast and another thing about this hybrid okra you know the pods need to be a certain size if they get too big traditionally they get tough well these hybrid okras let's say you miss a day or two picking you go back and you know you've got a real long huge pod that you would normally throw away well the hybrids are still tender and you can still use those but you know take them to the market people are just they know what okra is and they like a certain size alright you remember the picture of mr. Perkins and mr. Andrews and Cottondale where I grew up this is that same place in in about 1925 all that area was known as the company field and the people that lived in Cottondale well you know I don't know how they worked it out maybe they rented the property or else somebody was designated to to farm the place for a little while notice that this corn notice the wide spacing between the plants in the row now that's kind of interesting this is before hybrid corn and you know this was this was corn that you had saved down through the years and you know just planted it every year another interesting story about corn is one that my great-grandfather told my grandfather he told me so this story is about 150 years old give or take is about a couple of neighbors and one of them had run out of corn and he asked his neighbor if he could borrow some corn until his his corn came in and of course the neighbor said sure you know come on over and get the corn and so when the neighbor came to get the corn in his wagon he had his sideboards up on his wagon and so they loaded the corn and the neighbor went on back well when the neighbors corn came in he remembered his his deal with the night the other neighbor and you know brought him corn out of his patch to repay him but when he came to repay in his wagon he didn't have the sideboards up so the neighbor sort of felt a little cheated there so I had just kind of interesting how that goes but it's important to to remember this spacing here because I'm going to tell you something about how these things worked way back there we grew up when I was coming up on whitefield corn we didn't know what sweet corn was we planted the white corn it was we would go in and and harvest when the ears got big enough to harvest in the milk stage just like you would nowadays with sweet corn we would harvest the white corn white field corn and and my grandmother would bring it in and we'd have what's called a corn day we'd pick all the corn and or at least most of it anyway and she start cutting it I would I would chuck it and silk it and then she would take take a knife and cut it off of the cob and put it in a freezer container and freeze it and when you got ready to cook it you would take that container corn out and get a black iron skillet and put a little butter in that skillet and put that corn in that skillet and you'd fry it now that's a that's a different vegetable from sweet corn it if you did that with sweet corn you'd end up with cream corn which is basically what we were doing but because field corn has a much higher starch content the result was a different type of vegetable that had a different texture had different taste and it was just really really good this particular variety right here is an old ancient variety it's called Mexican June my grandparents grew this on the farm down in Hale County back before World War one so just kind of and I remember buying seed way back when I'd go to town with my grandmother we'd go the seed place and we would buy this this variety and you know you'd see sweet corn there for sale and I remember asking my grandmother one time I said grandmother how come we don't plant some of this and she's on all no no no we want this other so you know it was we we didn't know what to do with it you know we we do now but it was just a different way of thinking I guess the open pollinated white corn like I said we used it in the milk stage and fried it it was just really great no one of the illicit uses for white corn the best of the best moonshine used white corn and the way they did that back then they would they would malt the corn they would actually sprout it and then dry it and then if you took it to the mill to get it ground you had to make sure the miller was aware of your activities and would keep it confidential because if he was grinding corn that had been sprouted or malted there wasn't but any one one reason to do that and that was to make whiskey with it you would mix that in with ground corn and the sprouted corn has some enzymes in it that turn the starch into sugar fermentable sugar and that's that's how that works we've recently discovered set now that we've got the DNA technology and can sequence the genomes of some of these things that a lot of our old southeastern corn varieties are you know very closely related to or exact copies of some of those varieties that are still grown in parts of Mexico and it you know you kind of go get to thinking well how did that come about and remember that we fought a war with Mexico back in the 1840s and of course you know the army took their horses and mules and livestock down to Mexico with them and you know I'm not certain that some of this corn didn't come back in some feed sacks after the war but you know it there's no way to prove that is the way it happened there was quite a bit of trading back and forth anyway even in pre-columbian times the Native Americans that started farming here in the southeast six seven thousand years ago so and then they grew corn and beans and pumpkins and squash and things like that they also grew bottle gourds and they have found some bottle gourds in some sites that are around 8,000 years old so that's kind of interesting. Anson Mills in Columbia, South Carolina has gone back and tried to rescue some of these heirloom grains and rice products there's a whole unique culture over on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia and down into Florida a little bit it's called Sea Islands and that culture there is very reminiscent of the homeland of Africa I mean there's the people speak a dialect of English that is unique it's called Gullah but that that low country and those sea islands they preserved a lot of the old ways some of the things that they've been able to rescue are things like a purple straw wheat which is a soft white winter wheat that's high in protein and it's used for cakes biscuits and pastries and you know they've rescued that in there there's some they've done some seed increases and people are growing it now there's also a corn that is very similar to bloody butcher but it's a unique red corn they call Jimmy Red corn and that was almost extinct and they they found it and they start growing that again there's some Sea Island red peas we're going to talk about peas in depth but the peas I'm talking about right now these kind of peas are referred to as cow peas or southern peas or you know it's a different kind of pee all together from the green round English pea they also grow sesame over there and they call it Benny which is a direct African word for sesame and they still make what's called a Benny cake over there it's interesting culture so let's talk about southern peas the cowpea the southern pea whatever you want to call it that was a a legume vegetable that you could eat the peas it does really well on poor soil and there were just lots and lots and lots of different varieties and these peas came from West Africa this is another import from Africa another gift and there's a lot of variation in the peas this is just some old peas that I grew one year a red ripper and speckled purple hole and the lady peas now my grandmother grew the lady peas and she saved her seed what she would do she would harvest the pods after they dried and she'd leave them in the pod and she'd put all that in an onion sack and she'd hang it from the ceiling in the corner of a bedroom and the reason she kept them in the pod was because the weevils and things didn't bother them as bad while they were still in the hole and then the next spring when she got ready to plant she would shell those out and get the seed and plant them again the lady pea is a cream type pea it's a little bitty pea so anyway there's a lot of different a lot of variation in the peas it's four main types basically there's a cratter pea a black eye or pink eye type and a cream pea what people are drawn to and what they're used to nowadays is just a pink eye purple hole pea and there's a lot of different cultivars of pink eye purple hole and some of them include top pick there's a pink eye purple hole cow pea mosaic virus resistant pea Mississippi pink eye two is a new variety and cornet now there's also we also grew black eye peas and you can go to the store and buy a bag of black eyed peas off the shelf and you can plant those and they all produce black eyed peas now we'll say this the black eyed pea we always considered it to be a lot harder to grow not really harder to grow but it was the bugs got in them real bad so I guess the cow pea caculio which is a more the major pest of southern peas now would would really tear up the black eyes again here's another gift from Africa there there may also be some peas that are native to India and what was so good about this this vegetable is that they would do well on poor soils and they still grow this is a very important crop in West Africa and they've had some pest problems over there as well and they're actually growing some transgenic or you know genetically engineered peas that are they've incorporated some genes into that crop now that make the peas resistance to their major insect pest but you know the I mentioned the USDA seed bank a while back if you go on their website and type in vigna unguiculata and I won't spell that because I don't you know but that's that's how you do the search it'll pull up like almost 10,000 different collection of varieties that they collected in our storing it's pretty incredible but you can go back and find a whipper well pea of one called blue goose there was you know just a lot of different peas and you know if you're out in the middle of nowhere in the south and you're saving your seed a lot of times every farm would have a different pea or a different corn you know it just it's the way things worked out but there wasn't a lot of well I guess you know when people did trade back and forth and would would get new varieties from time to time now peas some of the peas have a really rank vining growth habit remember back when I showed you the cornfield how far the corn in the row was spaced apart well what we would do a lot of times when we went through and plowed the corn for the last time and did you know that would you that's what's called a lay by at that point in time you would come back in and plant some of these vining peas in the skips and the corn stalks would act as a support for those pea vines you go in and pull your roasting ears when they got ready go back and pick peas and then pick peas several times and then when fall came and the corn dried down you went and got the corn and it was you know took it to the mill and had it ground and that white corn made corn mill and grits and we had another vegetable used for white corn I'll tell you about in a little bit but that plant plantin the peas in the skips here's a here's a real sample this is Mr. Benjamin J. Carr making County Alabama he's in his cornfield but look where he's standing he's standing by the pea vines and look at those peas that are on that fine and I'm sure the reason this picture was taken is because he was awful proud of that this this is a family portrait from way back and it just kind of demonstrates how how things were done back in the old days so you got your peas you got your corn mill that you make cornbread and maybe some peppers or something else so this this is a meal right here what I remember about growing up during this time you know I told you that everybody had a big garden I remember some people some of our neighbors some neighbors in particular that I remember the Spencer's they were they grew up on a farm down in Hale County just just abject poverty just really hard times growing up Mr. Spencer was making 50 cents a day farming and he moved his wife and whole family the whole family they moved from Hale County up to Tuscaloosa County so he could go to work in a foundry to make 75 cents a day and they grew two or three huge gardens every year and he always had a cornfield go with it they they kept chickens they have a few hogs every once in a while and just you know just they didn't buy a lot of of groceries when they would come to shop they would buy sugar and coffee and tea and dairy products they didn't have a cow maybe they had one back on the farm but when they moved to Tuscaloosa I don't ever remember I'm having a cow but listen everybody worked everybody worked the garden everybody the dogs didn't even get to live free you know the dogs all had a job and if that dog wasn't doing his job he'd get traded off or sold or something and so you you know everything had a purpose Mr. Spencer had maybe one time I remember he had like maybe 300 chickens and it always kind of I've wondered about it for a long time and why did they have so many chickens well they ate them they ate the chickens they fished and always had a freezer full of fish Miss Spencer when they would when the peas would come in you know they'd shell peas and have fresh peas and they'd freeze them or count them or whatever and she wouldn't even throw the holes away she would make jelly out of peaholes peahole jelly that's a real thing honest to goodness I've had it and it's not too bad on a hot biscuit but they were just they were wonderful people and they they they were echoes of the way things used to be so here's something else that was a extremely important crop for us here in the southeast one of the reasons it was so important is because you can grow turnip greens almost year-round here in Alabama they don't do well in the hot summer time but you can plant them in the fall and pick them all winter and all spring maybe plant a little early crop in the spring and have a few and of course we had collards and kale and they were just it was a really really good crop for us you can eat the turnips of course an interesting thing about turnips turnips are these these crops these crucifer crops the greens collards the cabbages the broccoli the cauliflower things like that are native to Europe and over in Ireland they grow turnips but they eat the turnip they throw the top into the cap in and let the cows eat the tops but they eat the turnips now here we eat both the tops and the turnips and one interesting thing about the turnips in Ireland they carve jack-o-lanterns out of turnips they didn't have pumpkins so that was the traditional carving thing that they would do it during Halloween would be to carve turnips collards really important crop what's the difference between a collard and a cabbage well a collards just a cabbage that doesn't form a head and kale is a leafy green a lot like collards up here in Tinsley Valley people would plant turnips and kale together now back home down in West Alabama we planted turnips and mustard and we'd always have a little mustard in with the turnips or next to the turnips and we'd mix them together sometimes the turnip remember I mentioned the the cornmeal well my grandmother used to do something that I've only seen a couple of people do since then when she would cook a mess of turnip greens and she would she cooked greens and once they got done she would take the turnip greens the greens out of the pot and put them into another bowl or a vessel of some kind and she'd leave the potlicker in in in the pot where she'd cook the greens well if you get that potlicker boiling make up a kind of a stiff batter with that home ground cornmeal and hot water if you want to you can cut up an onion in it and you can make out a little dumpling and drop it into that potlicker and cook it now boy you talking about good those that was what we call meal dumplings I think over in Georgia they called them corn dodgers but we we just referred to them as cornmeal dumplings and they were really good that way you got everything out of the turnip top you ate the greens you ate the potlicker you ate the corn that was cooked in the potlicker and nothing went to waste and so just a really unique use for collards and well we we would cook collards a little different and then they were always good so I've already mentioned that collard just a cabbage didn't form a head and it's a really important commercial crop for some of us now to one of my co-workers mentioned the other day about broccoli well you can eat the leaves the head the stems you can you can do a lot with with broccoli you could probably do the same thing with collards also if you know what sauerkraut is that's a cabbage cut up and fermented to make sauerkraut well you can also make sauerkraut out of collards and it's really good I'm telling you I'm if you ever get a chance and have an abundance of collards try try making little sauerkraut out of the collards so the turnip greens that we grew were primarily the what variety called purple top white globe and that purple top turnip you take a bundle of turnips to the farmers market it better have that turnip on it with that that purple top that's what everybody's used to that's what they look for now we do have some hybrids that are really productive there's one hybrid turnip it doesn't form a turnip it just it just forms a leaves and it's it's really productive and you can maximize your production that way and I mentioned that here they planted turnips with kale and back home they planted it with mustard now this is a picture of my great-granddaddy and my granddaddy my granddaddy's little boy sitting there on that stack of lumber he was born in 1899 and so he would have been about maybe six or seven years old when this picture was taken but notice the the oxen there and how poor they are and you can count the ribs I mean this was hard times and if you didn't grow it or make it then you didn't use it. Granddaddy told me a story one time he said that his dad got sick and wasn't able to work for a while and the way he put it he said the cupboard got a little bare and what he was telling me was that he and his sisters and his brother and their mom and and other family members got hungry I mean there's not many people nowadays that knows what real hunger is but my granddaddy did remember a time when he he was absolutely hungry well he said a neighbor invited them over to pick turnip greens and so they went over and started picking turnip greens and granddaddy said for a while there they ate turnip greens for three meals a day breakfast dinner and supper and when when he told me that story I just just you know it sounded just far-fetched but I asked him I said granted how does turnip greens taste for breakfast and he said pretty good so you know if you're hungry you you do what you have to do and a lot of this culture is recorded for us in some different books this is one of the books that was written back in the 60s early 70s the the book is a just a bunch of historical facts and pictures about how people used to live way back this is an extremely good book about that kind of culture now the the people that it's written about were the people that settled in the southern Appalachians in the mountains north Georgia in particular for this book and western North Carolina but that same group of people came here that after the war of 1812 and the defeat of the Red Stick Creek Indians a lot of land was opened up in Alabama and there was a mass migration from the Carolinas and from Georgia and Tennessee and Virginia and they called it Alabama favor they're just thousands of people just streams of wagons coming into the to the state and some of these people that came were revolutionary war veterans or war of 1812 veterans and that's how the government paid them for their service they gave them land and that's how some of my people got here some of my family's been here since 1816 that's over 200 years and that particular ancestor was born in what is now northern Ireland he fought in the revolution in South Carolina migrated to Tennessee afterwards and then in 1816 came to Alabama and actually named and founded the town of Havana which is now in Hale County his closest neighbors at the time were Native Americans and periodically he would have to go back to Tennessee from time to time and left her with the family and and the servants and the Indians would come and trade and she was scared of them and so she didn't want to make a mad or anything and they brought honey wrapped in deer skins and they bit at one particular story when he got back home the Indians had traded her out of everything she had except the clothes she was wearing so he had more less start over and they made do but anyway I hope I've given you a little picture of life in the South and maybe this will encourage you to look at some hard times and maybe think well maybe these ain't so hard after all so if you enjoyed this and I wish you the very best and good luck