Brian, thanks for your very informative response. I have been to the Raleigh/Chapel Hill/Cary area a few times while visiting my son who is stationed in Goldsboro and found it very lovely. My DH was raised in a town in Connecticut that had a population of 2200 and now we live in a town with a population of 480. He actually LIKES this. I am all for living in a small town for I like the sense of community pride and commorodity that goes with that but I prefer a small town with at least 15,000 - 20,000 people LOL. My DH also wants acreage. Not a particular desire of mine as long as I am not living on top of someone else. He could never live on a property less than a few acres and that is where we are running into some issues. Due to the type of work he does we need to be within reasonable driving distance to a metropolitan area. I understand that Raleigh and Charlotte are the two places he is most likely to find employment so I have been scouting bedroom communities for both cities. I have found some lovely homes in the Lake Norman district outside of Charlotte as well as some in the Cary as well as Clayton area outside Raleigh. Thanks for the headsup about northern Raleigh and Cary. One thing I know is sure to send my hubby off the deep end is the hummer crowd. We see a lot of that where we live in the Berkshires. My hubby is a sweetheart and hates confrontation but he is also a man comfortable with who he is. Whenever he is amid the keep-up-with-the-Jones type of people something comes over him and he turns into a neanderthal which if it weren't so in-your-face- on his part it would be rather comical. We have the "New York" aka "The Wallstreet Crowd" that own summer homes around the lakes in our area. They are excruciatingly politically correct, pretentious and obnoxious. To protest their invasion every year DH goes out of his way to make things unpleasant for them. He has an old truck that he named Mable. The thing should have been buried about 25 years ago yet he insists on keeping it professing its value for hauling things around the property. At the peak of summer when he is sure to find the snobs, I mean New Yorkers at the one and only general store in the area he insists on driving my little daughter (who does not know any better) to the store for an ice cream cone. I have had the "pleasure" of being on a few of those trips myself and it is rather humorous to see the expressions on these peoples faces as he pulls "Mable" next to their Lexus' or Hummers. LOL...I overheard one man tell his wife "it really is time to sell our place here" after seeing my husband pull in and get out of his truck. She responded "oh dear but we love the lake so". It was the one and only time that I really wanted to go up to someone and tell them how rude they were and how much we looked forward to fall every year to be rid of them. At the time my DH was running his own company and financially was probably doing as well as anyone of these pompous jerks but they judged the book by the cover and thought we were the "poor relations". I managed to hold my tongue and I am glad I did. What do I care what these trogs think anyway and it is a good lesson for my daughter to learn about humbleness as well as seeing for herself how plastic some people truly are. I am all for intellectual dialect but attitudes are best checked at the door.

Bed Of Nails also known as Solanum quitoense is a relative of eggplant native to the mountains of South America. The story I heard is that the original plant in the wild did not have "nails" or spines at all. Through cultivation some forms developed the nasty spines. Throughout the regions where they are grown in S.A. there are many varieties, some with smaller leaves, some with spines only on one side, some with tons of spines. Most countries grow them for their fruit which is called by many names, two of the most popular are Naranjilla (little orange in Spanish) or Lulo in Columbia. The one growing in the plot is from "that place in Sanford", because of the high heat and dry this summer the fruit on it have little flavor. In cooler times the fruit tastes like a kiwi and is a popular flavoring in drinks down south.

Jsvand5, I don't know of any commercial source for Goose Creek seeds, but two people listed Goose Creek in the 2008 Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook. If you aren't a member of SSE yet, this would be a very good time to join because the 2009 Yearbook is just now going to the printer and will be out in a month or two. The Yearbook is a very good place to look for varieties that you can't find anywhere else, as many members list those for which they have enough seeds to offer. Laurel, there was never any patent granted for Goose Creek, nor will there be. Jimmy Williams applied for a patent on November 11, 2004 but it was never granted. Goose Creek was not "invented" by Jimmy Williams, and as noted above, the stages of ripeness described for Goose Creek are not unique to Goose Creek. Jimmy Williams can apply for a patent if he wishes but he won't get one. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has a public web page at http://patft.uspto.gov/ where anyone can look up patent applications as well as the patents that have been granted, and you will see that there is an application but it has NOT been granted. Anyone who wants to can go to the web page and verify this for themselves. Here is a link that might be useful: 2008 SSE Yearbook

Nearly all of the wild geese we see today do not migrate... Back in the early 1960's Canadian Geese were on the endangered list and nearing extinction. There is a Wildlife preservation group called "Ducks Unlimited" that was formed by waterfowl hunters and they began a program of creating habitat and hatching Canadian Geese and a number of different wild duck species which they released into the wild all along the eastern flyway. (Major wildfowl migration route), The problem today is that the geese that were hatched & released have little to no social interaction with the true wild geese, so they have not adopted the habit of migrating. To compound the problem, the geese that were hatched & released do not have the natural fear of man that is present in the true wild geese, so they have no problem with living on any available pond whether its out in the country or right in the middle of an urban area and as a consequence they have become a nuisance in many places.