Sugar Snap Peas, If You Please!

Every year at this time I post the same thing - my favorite thing in the garden to grow and to eat.  That would be Sugar Snap Peas.  I have two 15 foot rows of them and they are five feet tall right now, trellising on some cattle panels that I have secured to t-posts.  They are so doggone easy to grow, and they are one of the most pleasing things to look at. 

Their tendrils wrap around the trellis to hold while they shoot upward.  Their bright green foliage is like a living wall.  They are growing on the same trellis that I had cucumbers growing on last year.  When they first spring up, you have to train their tendrils to attach to the trellis.  It is important to weave them in and out, so that they hold tight.  We've had years where strong winds blew them down, and they became a tangled mess in which it was hard to find the peas to harvest.  This year they are latched on tight.

Sweet peas put out beautiful flowers-and lots of them.  Honeybees zero in on the garden and buzz from flower to flower.

Those flowers quickly produce pods of peas - and plenty of them.  This is one of those things that you can pick right off the vine and eat while you're standing in the garden.  They are so sweet.  I like to snack on them before the peas inside the pods have matured.  The pods are crisp, tender and sweet as candy.  Now, you can buy pre-packaged vegetable trays in stores that have something like sugar snap peas on them.  You've probably seen them.  The flavor and freshness are NOTHING like the ones you can grow in your garden.  I normally purchase mine from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, but if you are diligent in saving your seeds year after year, you won't have to purchase many.

If you let the peas develop and mature, to me, they aren't as sweet.  At the end of the season, I do let some of them get mature and dry on the stalk.  I save these for seed for next year.  Sugar snap peas are prolific producers.  Growing upright on a trellis, the footprint is small and they don't take up much space and that means your yield per square foot beats most anything else you can grow.

We're out in the garden every other day, pickin' and eatin'.  Just as fast as you pick, more are coming.  They'll produce until it warms up. 

In addition to snacking on them raw, Tricia likes to stir fry them in butter where they are still slightly crisp.  She'll also add them to fried rice, stews and soups.

At this time, we're picking more than we can eat, so Tricia has been blanching them and then freezing the excess in quart-sized freezer bags.  We've found that by doing so, you can quickly cook them up as a side dish and they truly taste like you just picked them!  By the time the sugar snap peas have finished, I'll use the trellis for the two varieties of cucumbers that I just planted in seed pots this afternoon.