Growing Peas

 

I like peas. Over the years, I have grown as muc
h as we can eat during the few weeks that they are in season in my small garden. I like snow peas even better than regular peas for several reasons. One important reason is that they don’t become starchy if you wait too long between picking and eating.

My occasional problem with regular peas was that I was in charge of the growing and the picking while my roommate was in charge of the cooking and serving. Sometimes, our schedules for preparing the little green peas were not coordinated, causing my peas to lose flavor during storage a sort of ‘starchy’ taste predominated over their normal flavor.

One year I decided to grow snow peas – the kind where you eat the pods as well as the tasty baby peas growing within. Preparation of these peas is easier inasmuch as no effort is needed to separate the pea from its convenient container, a boring, tedious job my mother often assigned to me, a task she called ‘shelling the peas.’ Now, some fifty years later, I have finally figured out how to dispense with that troublesome task by substituting snow peas for the regular kind.

So, I changed from regular peas to snow peas after the first successful year. This year must have been the 4^th or 5^th year of growing snow peas, so I was prepared for the task of planting, constructing a support system for the tender vines, and harvesting the peas for dinner when they were ready to eat, picking only a small amount that was large enough to enjoy as a vegetable fresh from the garden.

By now, you may be wondering what about this year’s crop of peas justifies a blog occupying both my time and yours. Here’s the skinny: You can’t believe what is written on the seed packages. Before I planted the latest round of peas, I carefully read the planting instructions, determined to follow their recommendations, notwithstanding my hard-won expertise in gardening. The package clearly stated that support for the growing peas was needed, but that the trellis wanted was short and simple since these peas only attained a height of 28 inches.

“Ha,” I said aloud. “I can make a simple pole system from my existing supply of 2 X 2 - inch poles that I have secreted in my barn.” I jumped into the task. Since the poles needed to extend only to a height of 28 inches, in almost no time I had prepared a simple framework of poles surrounding the seed bed where my newly purchased seeds were growing just below the surface of the prepared soil.

It has turned out that my peas must not have read the package instructions, most of the plants attained a height of well over 28 inches, provoking the uppermost foliage to bend over, becoming entangled and hiding the tender little peas. In addition to the unseemly appearance of the plants, the entanglement also complicated picking of the pods that shared the same color as the plant’s leaves, resulting in many of the little devils managing to hide among the seeming thousands of plant leaves. The consequence was that some of the tasty peas weren’t, since they got too big, too old, too soon.

So, there it is. Another burden I have to bear in my continuing quest of gardening for fun and healthy nutrition. I thought you might want to know how us North Woods retirees spend our time on complicated subjects like growing peas or flower-less Hydrangeas … (more about that later).