Peas, Louise!
Earlier this week we harvested our first peas:
If you're thinking this doesn't look like much, you're right. Even though these pods barely fill a soup bowl, they had to be picked and eaten before they got too big and dried out. If you don't pick them, the vine dies back because it thinks it's done its job producing seeds and can quit. Anyway, once shelled, this is what we got for our first meal:
Everyone did an admirable job sharing their single spoonful of peas, but methinks we need to plant a LOT more next year. According to Back to Basics: How to Learn and Enjoy Traditional American Skills (an awesome back-to-the-land, Reader's-Digest-goes-hippie book from the 70s that you should buy immediately), a self-sufficient gardener should allow 10 row feet of peas per person. That mean we need 40 rows of peas for our family. We planted about 25 this year, but half are snap peas. This is what 25 feet of peas look like:
So next year, I think we should quadruple this to line one axis of brick path completely, making a nice little screen on both sides of the path. That will be 75 feet of regular peas and 25 feet of snap peas for snacking.
On the bright side, our snap peas are finally coming in. These are some weird peas, I gotta say. They took forever to germinate and forever to bloom, and then they had those blue and purple flowers. Then it took another round of forever for them to produce pods. After all that, it turns out that these are some big bullies of a pea vine that have overtaken the regular peas now. Compare:
Here we have neat and orderly regular peas.
If you're thinking this doesn't look like much, you're right. Even though these pods barely fill a soup bowl, they had to be picked and eaten before they got too big and dried out. If you don't pick them, the vine dies back because it thinks it's done its job producing seeds and can quit. Anyway, once shelled, this is what we got for our first meal:
Everyone did an admirable job sharing their single spoonful of peas, but methinks we need to plant a LOT more next year. According to Back to Basics: How to Learn and Enjoy Traditional American Skills (an awesome back-to-the-land, Reader's-Digest-goes-hippie book from the 70s that you should buy immediately), a self-sufficient gardener should allow 10 row feet of peas per person. That mean we need 40 rows of peas for our family. We planted about 25 this year, but half are snap peas. This is what 25 feet of peas look like:
So next year, I think we should quadruple this to line one axis of brick path completely, making a nice little screen on both sides of the path. That will be 75 feet of regular peas and 25 feet of snap peas for snacking.
On the bright side, our snap peas are finally coming in. These are some weird peas, I gotta say. They took forever to germinate and forever to bloom, and then they had those blue and purple flowers. Then it took another round of forever for them to produce pods. After all that, it turns out that these are some big bullies of a pea vine that have overtaken the regular peas now. Compare:
Here we have neat and orderly regular peas.
And here we have crazy-ass purple flowered snap peas, all tangled up and falling over each other. The tendrills on these are so strong that they are actually bending the stems into weird angles:
And the stems are twisting and curling too:
Hopefully this is something the vine can handle and the messed-up stems don't harm the plant, because there are literally hundreds of blossoms now that I would like to see grow into food for my plate some day. I don't know … I've never seen peas quite like this.
If you're playing along at home, our regular peas are Laxton Progress (from New England Seed Company's organic line). The snap peas are Dwarf Gray Sugar (from Hart's Seed Oriental Vegetables line). Feel free to comment if you have any experience with these.
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