One of the Sweetest Things in the Garden

Sugar Snap Peas!  I would say that they are #3 on the list of sweetest things in the garden.  Sugar cane definitely holds the top spot, followed closely by sugar beets, but sugar snap peas are wonderful.  We like to stir fry them with fried rice, but also like them raw.  They trellis up nicely on the trellis we use for cucumbers.  The added bonus they bring to the table are the beautiful blooms!

They vine up the trellis, clinging to it with tendrils that wrap around and hold on for dear life.  The peas load up with pods.  You must be judicious in picking them, for if you wait too long, the peas get overripe and become tough.  The size in the photo below are perfect for how we harvest them.

I generally make a couple of passes on both sides of the trellis to make sure I get them all.  It takes a second look because sometimes some of the pods can be hidden and you'll miss them only to find them a day or two later and have to feed them to the chickens or goats as by that time they'll be too tough for human consumption.

For the ones that I pick, I'll wash them up and then 'string' them, pinching off each end and pulling the string that lines each side of the pea pod.  Then they're ready to cook!

The sad thing about sugar snap peas is that they don't tolerate the heat.  As soon as the days get into the 80's, they quickly start dying off.  That's too bad.  No more sugar snap peas until fall.  But I'll use their space on the trellis for growing Black-eyed snap beans on.  We'll likely be planting those tomorrow!

Almost May and the Fall Crop is Still Coming In

Today was the 27th of April and the outside temperature was 86 degrees already!  Things are heating up.  I have most of the spring garden in the ground and it is growing quickly.  However, there are still some holdouts from the fall garden that are still producing.

First, we have some beets.  We grow three varieties: Bull's Blood, Detroit Red, and Chioggia.  We've been roasting a lot of these and have given a bunch away.  One lady we gave them to told us that she's making baby food for her infant using the beets.  You can't "beet" that.  Here's a crate of fresh picked beets.

Even though we've picked quite a few beets, we still have a bunch left to harvest.  I like to harvest them when they are about the size of a tennis ball.  We've found if you let them get bigger, they can get tough and "woody."  Can I speak freely here?  We're old friends, aren't we?  When you eat a lot of beets, something happens that people don't mention in polite conversation: It can appear that you are 'passing blood' and can be quite frightening.  It's not blood, though.  Don't worry.  It's beets in your diet.

Next on the clock from the fall garden that will be ending soon are sugar snap peas.  These grow on a trellis and they'll soon be replaced by a second planting of cucumbers.  But for now, they are still blooming beautiful flowers:

And they're continuing to make sweet, tender pods.  We love to eat them raw, but my favorite way to eat them are stir fried in butter or cook them in fried rice.  I like to pick them on the young side before the peas in the pod get too big.

I picked a nice colander full of sugar snap peas and Tricia gave them all away to our oldest son, Russ!

Not to worry, there's more on the way that I'll pick tomorrow.

The Worm Turns

The worm turns is an idiom used to explain a situation that changes suddenly and abruptly.  It's appropriate to use that expression when talking about today's topic.  Cucumbers.  Our spring/summer cucumber crop was stellar, stupendous, and superlative.  Each day we'd harvest all we could carry.  We ate them every lunch, gave lots away at church and to family and friends and lacto-fermented many pickles in gallon and quart-sized jars.  

When the cucumbers in that garden petered out, I planted another row of them on the same trellis, while working some compost into the soil for nutrients.  You never want to take more out of the soil than you put into it.  The cucumbers quickly grew, attached themselves to the trellis, bloomed and set fruit. In fact, just as we ate the last pickle from the pickle jar, the cucumber harvest began to come in again.  We were just starting to bring in a half dozen a day and enjoying them cut up with some salt and pepper, olive oil and balsamic vinegar and then...

And then in one stinking day things turned south.  Worms descended on our cucumbers like the plagues in Egypt.   I guess had I been more vigilant and observant, I could have tried some neem oil on them, but it was not to be.

Just look at the destruction.  A few days prior, the leaves were broad and bright green, tendrils gripping the trellis as hopeful vines inched skyward.  Today we're left with webs, poop and the remnants of formerly productive vines.  

I scratched through the rubble of the failed crop and found the perpetrator, in fact three of them feasting on the last remaining cucumber.  I tossed it over the fence where many hens were waiting and watched with delight as I witnessed the worms got their comeuppance.

But no long faces here,  tomorrow I'll work some fresh compost and some chicken litter into the soil beneath the trellis and I'll plant our fall crop of Sugar Snap Peas.  Things turned quickly with the cucumbers - from abundance to abhorrent.  But things can turn quickly again with our crop of sugar snap peas hopefully and prayerfully planted.  If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Pre-Freeze Mini Harvest

One of the things I perhaps didn't explain in my summary of preparing for the freeze was a very quick mini-harvest of items that we knew from past experience would not make it through the temperature drop.  With that in mind, we had to harvest everything edible off the stalks, feed all the stalks to the animals and preserve the harvest.

I won't be able to show you everything tonight, but we'll make a start.  Sugar Snap Peas.  These little guys are a favorite of mine.  The greenery and blooms are beautiful, attracting honeybees and the occasional nozy goat that cranes its neck over the garden fence to rob goodies off the trellis.  These, we've learned, don't fare well when temps drop into the low 20's.

On a beautiful day just before the plunging temps, I brought a basket and walked near the trellis on both sides, plucking off the tender pods.  Of course I ate some raw just standing there.  Once I was sure I had gotten them all, I snipped off the vine and tossed to the livestock.  They quickly devoured it.  It's too bad, really.  Without this two day freeze, these would have produced and produced and produced.

Now we had already harvested several quarts (easy) of sugar snap peas up to this point, but we quickly filled another basket.  We'll stir fry these in butter, leaving a bright green color and a nice crunch to them.

But once I emptied the basket, I went out with Tricia and we picked every last tomato off of the tomato that had come up from seed in the garden in late summer.  I don't even know which heirloom variety it is.  If I had to guess, I would say Cherokee Purple.  All of these tomatoes were picked on January 14th from ONE TOMATO PLANT.

That's quite a haul from one plant!

We decided to weigh them just for grins to see what we had.  Unfortunately, we didn't zero out the scale.  The gross weight was 13 1/2 pounds of green tomatoes.

We put them in a box in an attempt to get them to ripen.  We'll cook with a bunch of them, too!  My Mom and Dad harvested some green tomatoes from their plants and had fried green tomatoes for supper.  That is some pretty good eating.  There's more coming out of the garden, but I've got to make room.  I am planning to plant the spring onion crop this weekend.

Holding Stuff Together With Baling Twine

There is an old, tired line about holding stuff together with duct tape, chewing gum, and baling twine.  Sometimes, it's true, and is exactly what we do use to fix things.  When the cows are just about finished with a round bale of hay, I'll go out to the bale with my pocketknife and will cut the twine into manageable pieces.  I roll it together neatly and put it aside.  You never can tell when you'll need it.

Just so happens I needed it the other day.  With our "summer in late December" gifting us with days in the 80's, our garden is growing by leaps and bounds.  In fact the crop of cilantro is bolting right now.  You can see it on the bottom left of the photo below.  The other thing you can see is our Sugar Snap Peas growing on the trellis.  It is growing so fast and so lush and heavy, that it is causing us some problems.

The vines normally wrap their tendrils around the trellis and creep upward.  Some have done so, but others are so heavy, they are either breaking loose or they haven't firmly attached themselves to the trellis and are pulling down the other peas.  It's a mess and will be very difficult to harvest them.  Harvest won't be many days away.  The vines are full of blooms and little pods are already forming.

But, here's where the baling twine comes in.  I had wifey help me.  I strung out the baling twine from one end of the trellis to the other.

And then I pulled it tight and tied it up.  The twine pulled the vines back up to the trellis where, hopefully, the tendrils will wrap themselves against the cattle panels and hold this time.  

I'm thinking that next week I'll have to add another layer of twine a couple of feet higher.  I also use the twine for the "Florida Weave Tomato Trellis" method that we use every year.  Save your twine.  You never know what it'll come in handy for.

Planting Sugar Snap Peas

A favorite fall vegetable crop of ours is Sugar Snap Peas.  They are a staple in our garden from year to year.  They blanch and freeze well and are delicious in stir fry dishes, soups and Asian dishes and to just eat them raw out standing by the pea trellis.  Once I cleared out the beans from the trellis that were finishing up from the Spring Garden, I reworked one little row to prepare a nice seedbed for this year's Sugar Snap Peas.

I plant them one inch deep and four inches apart right beneath the trellis, which is simply a 16 foot livestock panel placed between t-posts for support.  The soil was covered with mulch and as I raked away the mulch, the ground worked up well, not compacted at all and had good soil moisture.

The peas are dried out, but upon coming in contact with the soil, they'll come to life!

Here is a better photo of the trellis.  If you look closely, you can see the peas in the trench, planted four inches apart.  It is important to have a sturdy trellis as these peas grow tall, exceeding 6 feet.  The plant can be heavy and will blow over in high winds.  Sometimes we have to tie the vines to the trellis.  Once the peas get about 5 inches tall, they send out tendrils.  We walk by and wrap the tendrils around the trellis to train them to climb.  Once latched on, there's no stopping them!

We thought we were all good to go, but then it rained.  And rained and rained.  We never thought it would stop.  All the peas in the ground must have rotted because only 1 sugar snap pea plant germinated!  But that won't slow us down.  As soon as the ground dried up, we replanted from the peas in the same packet.  This time they germinated.  Every last one of them.

The little peas are vigorous and healthy.  Cooler temperatures and beautiful weather have encouraged growth.  Before long we'll pull mulch around the base of the plants to discourage competition from weeds.  Then I'll add some fish emulsion and we'll sit back and watch them grow.

In addition to being delicious to eat, sugar snap peas have beautiful flowers that enhance the garden.  We'll show some photos as the pea crop of 2021 progresses.

I Walked Through the Garden Alone

 I walked through the garden alone,

    While the dew is still on the roses broccoli.

It's a beautiful old hymn that I took the liberty of changing to match what I actually saw.  I don't have roses in our garden, although Tricia has some pretty ones by the back patio.  On the weekends, I walk out to the hen house to open the nesting boxes.  I like to do that early otherwise the hens will lay their eggs in the strangest of places.  My walk to the hen house leads me through the garden.  The sun is still rising over the horizon and the scenery in the garden is always nice.  

Here's a quick tour:  (Dewdrops bedazzling a big, healthy broccoli leaf)

Turnips!  I planted them overly thick.  We eat the turnip greens and slice the turnip roots to give to the cows.  They love them.

French Breakfast Radishes in the foreground with brussels sprouts and garlic chives further back.  We have a great Radish Dip recipe that we always have around in a bowl this time of year.

Berlicum carrots marking the rows.  These were the slowest growing this year, but they've willed themselves to sprout up through the mulch and are in a growth spurt now.  As you can tell, the oxalis is also coming up in the carrot row despite the thick mulch.  We'll have to weed those out.

The lettuce patch.  We have several varieties growing, including Black-Seeded Simpson, Oak Leaf, Lollo Rossa, Rocky Top Mix, and Red Romaine.  We're pinching off the fresh new growth for salads every night.

 

Galilee Spinach.  This variety comes from Israel.  We like to make homemade Cream of Spinach Soup with this on cold, gloomy, drizzly nights.  It'll put the warmth back in your bones.

Bull's Blood Beets between two more rows of carrots.  As both the beets and carrots grow, the variation in color will light up this section of the garden.  I made it a point this year to widen the paths between the rows.  The mulch really helps to keep down weed growth in the walkways.  (More on this later)

Sugar Snap Peas.  The first pods are ready for picking with blooms starting to fill the trellis.

Starting right to left, we have Dinosaur Kale, three varieties of cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli. I should have allowed more space for a walkway between crops, ha ha!  They've shaded out between the rows, so we don't have to worry about weeds, but it will be a challenge to harvest!  They are very healthy!  Can't wait for harvest time!  

Peas, If You Please

Despite saving a quart jar full of sugar snap peas for seed, I rooted around in my "Winter Seed" ziploc bag in the freezer and pulled out 3 seed packages that I need to plant to keep the freshest seed available for next years' planting.  Seeds from Baker Creek are open pollinated heirloom seed that allow you to save seeds year after year to plant.

Sugar snap peas like to grow on a trellis, so the first thing I did was uproot the t-posts holding the trellis that our Birdhouse gourds and Luffa gourds grew on until the hurricane.  I moved the trellis about four feet north in order to give the sugar snap peas some "fresh" ground to grow in.  The trellis consists of two 16 foot hog panels stacked atop one another.  I use tie wire to fashion it all together.

At first glance this looks like Wasabi Peas, you know, the ones coated with the spicy stuff that makes your eyes tear up when you eat them?  But they are not for eating.  We'll plant these in the ground and we'll get 100 times the return this winter/spring.  These peas are huge producers.  I highly recommend them.

Planting recommendations call for seeds to be spaced out between 4-6 inches.  I plant them a little closer.  They grow vertically and won't be crowding one another out.

I covered up the seed and raked soil over the trench evenly.  After they sprout, I'll rake wood chips around the plants to discourage weeds and retain soil moisture.

By this weekend the peas ought to be popping out of the ground.  We'll be harvesting the sweet potatoes you see in the upper right portion of the photo above.  Once done. we'll plant carrots and lettuce in that spot.

Saving Sugar Snap Pea Seeds for Next Year

Life has a way of getting in the way, busyness and spontaneous happenings are constantly setting your priorities.  Lots of times planning goes out the window and instead of proactive planning, you find yourself reacting to the daily rigors that rise to the top of the to do list.  It is kind of like a real-life "Whack-A-Mole" game where you hit down things that pop up.

Planning ahead is important - especially in gardening.  The photo below looks like an unkempt, unsightly mess.  And it is.  But it is much more than that.  It is next year's Sugar Snap Pea Crop.  How can that be?  Let's look closer.

Over the winter months, we've harvested the peas many, many times and have eaten a bunch of them and also blanched and frozen a bunch for eating later.  As the weather warms, sugar snap peas wilt and the vines on the trellis quickly turn brown and die.  Once the pea pods get large and tough, we stop harvesting them and let the biggest ones mature on the vine.  You can see a few below:

The trellis for peas must be torn down and moved to make room for spring and summer crops.  First, we'll pull the dried pea pods off the vine.

The peas inside are plump and large.  They are perfect seeds for next year.  Since these are not hybrid, and they are open-pollinated, these perfect peas will make up the seeds I plant later this fall.

I'm looking forward about five or six months ahead when it is time to plant more peas.  But first, I need to make sure these peas are dried fully.

I will keep them on the window sill out of the humidity and allow them to dry. 

Once the peas are dried and stable, I'll pack them into old vitamin and supplement containers and store them away in the dark.  They'll sit there until the fall - then we'll plant more.  And the cycle continues.  The best part about it is that the seeds are free!  And I've saved enough of them that I could skip saving seeds next year and have plenty for planting from the next year's crop.  It's great when a plan works out.

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.