Reply To: Worst Preparedness Advice EVER!!!!

  • DeepSouthBamaGRITS

    Member
    January 27, 2023 at 10:35 pm

    I had to laugh a little at this reference to cowpeas. My grandmother (born & raised in Georgia) told me that cow peas USED to be grown to feed cows as they were abundant and provided them with good nutrition. During the Civil War when there was very little food to eat people resorted to eating the cowpeas to survive and found they were very tasty. Thus they have since evolved into a human source of food & not so much as a source for cows to eat. (Even tho some oldtimers may still plant them for their cows as cover crops). I almost fainted at the prices of ANY cowpea seeds last spring. They started at $5 a lb, depending on the variety you wanted.
    I also remember another situation when I was in a seed swap group several years ago. There was a blog I joined to swap seeds (veggie & flowers) from people all over the US. I made a swap with someone from up north and when he found out I lived in the south, he asked if I wanted a bunch of COWPEA seeds someone had recently given him. He had no clue what to do with them as he had never heard of this variety of “PEA” (He was more interested in planting what we refer to as English or Sweet Peas). I gladly took them even tho they were few in number I still planted each envelope of them and enjoyed the fruits of my labor.
    If we could only turn back the hands of time (in some instances) and learn to do the things our ancestors did to feed their animals as well as themselves we wouldn’t be in the predicament we are in now with so many fingers in the pie controlling what we can or can’t grow and eat
    Thank you for responding and taking me back to a stroll down memory lane with cowpeas!