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!

The Sweetest Thing in the Garden

(Other than my wife, ha ha!)

Sweet Peas!  Just the name of them gets your taste buds anticipating a sweet, crunchy taste.  I usually plant them in the fall and then again in the early spring.  They don't like hot weather.  The ceiling for the high temperatures for them is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit and we're already 14 degrees above that on an average day.  Their yield will soon fall off and they'll succumb to the South Louisiana summer sauna.  I'll be harvesting every other day to try to get what we can off of them.  I like to eat them right off the trellis while picking them.

The sweet pea puts out stunning white blooms all over the stalks, attracting honeybees and butterflies.

I have two varieties growing.  The first is the Oregon Sugar Pod.  They are my favorite as they produce a big, wide and flat pod that is tender with small peas inside.  The second is the Sugar Snap Peas.  They have a smaller pod that is rounded, with bigger peas inside.

The peas have thrived in the location of my trellis.  I alternate sweet peas with cucumbers and fertilize with fish emulsion and composted chicken litter.  They climb on a cattle panel I have supported with t-posts.  You can't see perspective on the height, but they are approximately seven feet tall and growing!  Even though their tendrils attach to the cattle panel, the weight of the plant causes the entire plant to sag.  To remedy this, you can see that I've taken some baling twine, tied it together and fashioned a "seat belt" to hold the plant firmly to the panel.  If I didn't do this, harvesting the peas would be virtually impossible.

I generally walk out to the garden with a kitchen colander and pick the ripe ones off.  I generally circle the trellis a couple of times since many of the pods are hiding in all of the foliage.  The goats come up to the fence hoping for some sweet peas, but, no dice, goats!

We are picking pretty decent quantities and we'll be blanching and freezing quart bags real soon.  Other than eating them raw, and it salads, we like to sauté them in a skillet with butter and salt.

Delicious!

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.

Behold The Hyacinth Bean

Back in early May of this year, I posted about the Hyacinth Bean.  You can click on that hyperlink, if you wish, and read about how we got this interesting, beautiful, and deadly (Gasp!) plant in a seed swap.  We grew the seeds and they grew, slowly at first, but then they spread out, competing with the vines of the luffa gourd to cover the 'tunnel' trellis we created with a fence we bent over.

This would have been a beautiful tunnel, but the goats had other ideas than an aesthetic addition to the garden and promptly stretched their long necks with their feet on the fence and ate the hyacinth bean vines that got close to them.  So a half tunnel trellis it will be.  Thank you, goats.

The purple stems of the hyacinth bean and the purple veins in the leaves make this plant a knockout in the garden.  But the flowers of this plant are stunning, and I'm not a flower guy.

Ain't that something?!  The honeybees buzz around them doing their thing.  I should have some seeds of this beautiful plant to share, just as they were shared with me.  If you are interested, just let me know and I'll send you some.  

But that's not the only pretty thing about this plant.  Once the flowers are done, they put on pods.  Pretty purple pods that contain beans.  The beans are edible, I've read, until they are dried, with a few caveats.  According to THIS POST:

Important Note: Uncooked seeds are poisonous as they contain high concentrations of cyanogenic glucosides. They can cause breathing problems, vomiting problems, and convulsions. They need to be boiled for a long time, changing the water twice, to make them edible. Better to leave the cooking to someone experienced with them and save your seed for planting.

That information makes me pause a little before trying to eat them, but I am curious about how they taste.  If they are that pretty, they must taste good, right?  Sometimes, you gotta take a measured risk.  I think about the guy or gal that ate the first raw oyster.  Or boiled the first crawfish?  What culinary delights we would have missed out on if we allowed fear to guide our decisions?

The jury's still out on if we'll try to eat them.  I'll let you know when/if we do.  Until then, it's a crazy world out there, ya'll HOLD ON!  These two hyacinth beans being entwined by the tendrils of a luffa gourd beautifully illustrate that:

That photo also reminds me of a song I used to like in high school by .38 Special whose lyrics went like this:

You see it all around you
Good lovin' gone bad
And usually it's too late when you
Realize what you had

And my mind goes back to a girl I left
Long years ago who told me

Just hold on loosely
But don't let go
If you cling too tightly
You're gonna lose control

Have a nice weekend, everyone!

High Time for Muscadines

Seven years ago my son worked at a nursery in Forest Hill, Louisiana.  He brought home a muscadine vine and we planted it in the side yard.  Muscadines are a grape native to the southeastern United States.  We used a cattle panel wired between two t-posts for a trellis.  Each year we've watched it grow and have picked many muscadines off of it.  It keeps getting bigger and bigger and we've installed extensions to the trellis to accommodate its growth.

They are delicious!  They have a deep flavor that is good even eaten off the vine while warmed by the sun.  They are full of seeds, so you better be ready to spit!  My oldest son solves that problem by eating the seeds.  Can you imagine?

The variety we have is ripe when it is dark.

At the peak of the season, you can pick a couple of quarts of muscadines.  There's always a bird's nest in the middle of the vine.  It is such a nice hiding spot for birds.  Birds certainly have to be careful around our house.  Our cat, Ginger, is a hunter.  She routinely hunts and eats birds, squirrels, rats, mice, moles.  She'll leave their bloodied and half-eaten carcasses on the back door welcome mat to proudly show us what she's done.  This morning there was a young cottontail rabbit that Ginger had killed.  The bad thing is, when Ginger eats her kill, it makes her sick.  She threw up all over the hood of our car while it sat in the garage today!  That was a long explanation to say "birds like to build nests in the middle of the muscadine vine to stay safe from Ginger, the crazy, murderous cat.

Here is a nice shot of a quart of fresh-picked muscadines, plump and beautiful.

Here is a photo of a few days' of the muscadine harvest:

Tomorrow I'll show you something else we do with them besides snack on them.

The Birdhouse Gourd Arbor

Our wood chip pile at the south end of the garden has been invaded!  Heirloom Louisiana Ribbon Sugar cane grows in there, but so does luffa gourds, watermelon, cantaloupe, Tahitian Melon Squash, butternut squash, and lastly, birdhouse gourds.  The birdhouse gourd vines are prolific - almost like kudzu.  They grow everywhere and at night, their white blooms decorate the wood chip pile.

This year I decided to make an arbor or a trellis with an old piece of reinforcement fencing that I normally use for a cucumber trellis.  Except this time I made it into an arch in order to make a tunnel of sorts to walk through.  We have a pathway down the eastern side of the garden that opens to a gate leading to the barn.  Each day we walk this path several times.  

The tendrils of the birdhouse gourds grasp anything in their way, clinging tightly.  The tendrils have "springs" that allow it to flex as the winds blow.

The big leaves of the vine are growing and as the vines stretch out, they will eventually shade out the area.  I like that idea.  Tricia is a little concerned that snakes might lurk in the birdhouse gourd arbor and fall down on her as she passes beneath it.  That would not be good.  I would never hear the end of it.

The birdhouse gourd gets its name because, once dried, you can drill a hole and make a nice birdhouse.  We made several of these in prior years.  Unfortunately, the birds were slow on the take and wasps found that they were perfect places in which to build nests.  We will try again this year.  Tricia has painted some of them different colors and hangs them from tree branches like ornaments.  They are full of seeds and when shaken, they can be a musical instrument.  Finally you can cut them in half and make a dipper for getting water to drink out of a bucket.

As the trellis fills out with leaves and the gourd crop comes in, we'll update you on the progress.

Harvested a Few Peanuts This Weekend

A couple months ago I shared the photo below of the peanut plants flowering.  It is a bright yellow pretty flower a little smaller than a sweet pea flower, but very similar in appearance.

Back in August, the row of peanuts looked like this in the photo below.  They are being encroached upon by the black-eyed peas, but peanuts are hardy plants.  I knew they would hold their own.

Fast-forward to October...

Part of the plan this weekend was to harvest some items to make room to put in more of the fall/winter crops.  I got busy with another item that took most of the morning, so I didn't get to harvest any sweet potatoes.  I did, however, harvest some peanuts that I had growing on a row to the south of the black-eyed peas.

It wasn't a huge harvest, but I didn't have a huge amount planted.  I had saved some peanuts from a harvest a couple of years ago.  I wasn't sure if they would germinate or not, but put some in the ground and lo and behold, they grew.  We pulled them from the ground and tossed them over the trellis that will hold the sugar snap peas.  Those, by the way, have sprouted and will climbing on the trellis in about two weeks.  In the meantime, the peanuts will dry out on the empty trellis.

Peanuts, once they bloom, send down pegs into the ground.  On each of these pegs is an embryo and a peanut will form and grow until maturity, each pod holding 3 or 4 or 5 peanuts.

We will allow them to dry on the trellis, then we'll roast them in the oven and eat them.  I'm thinking that perhaps we'll make some homemade peanut butter like we did many years ago.  That was really good.  We experimented and made chocolate peanut butter and cinnamon peanut butter.

Although the crop wasn't exceedingly large, we didn't plant many, and we'll enjoy the ones we harvested nonetheless.  We'll be planting something else in the ground that the peanuts occupied - probably mustard greens, lettuce, or radishes.

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.

The Neighbor's Vineyard

And sow the fields, and plant vineyards, which may yield fruits of increase.  He blesseth them also, so that they are multiplied greatly; and suffereth not their cattle to decrease.  Psalm 107:37-38

Sunday afternoon our neighbors were in the yard, and we walked over to talk to them.  They had brought over some fresh fig cookies and several bags of apples, and we wanted to thank them.  It is so good to have good neighbors.  We were standing in the shade visiting underneath their vineyard.  They are taking care of their parents who aren't in great health.  This keeps them very busy.

As a result they mentioned that they wouldn't have time to pick their grapes and offered to us to feel free to pick as many as we'd like.  Well, that's an offer we can't pass up.  Our muscadine grape vines are juveniles.  Our neighbor's grapes are old and established and produce lots more than ours.  We took them up on their offer.  Tricia grabbed our ladder and a few buckets and started picking grapes in the neighbor's arbor.

Tricia finally gets a "raise"

I found a shady, comfortable spot to pick!  Mr. Bill, our neighbor's Dad who planted the grapes also built the trellis the grapes grow on.  He was a Drilling Superintendent for an oil company, so the trellis is made with drill stem.  This grape trellis will be standing for the next 200 years!

While our muscadines are dark red when ripe, these are a shiny golden-green when ripe.  Some have a pinkish tinge.  The ripe ones are also soft to the touch.

They are quite large - bigger than a shooting marble.  More like the size of the "plunker" marbles we used to play with.

In no time flat, we picked this Tupperware cake cover and two and a half bucketfuls!  We weighed them when we brought them inside and they weighed 32 pounds in total.

The grape vines are healthy.  Just look at all the foliage!

When picking, we clip the bucket on the hook on the top of the ladder meant for holding paint cans when you are painting.  That little hook works fine for this application as well.

We brought all the grapes inside.  What in the world are we gonna do with 32 pounds of grapes?  Well, on Thursday night, I'll post Part 1 with more details about our Great Grape Project of 2020.

This Years' First Picking of Muscadines

Muscadines are a grape that is native to the southeastern - south central United States.  If you take a walk into the woods in our area, you'll find them growing wild along the banks of the bayou with vines growing high into the trees overhead.  In May 2014, we planted our own muscadine vine in the side yard and we have it on a trellis made from a cattle panel.

Each year we pick more and more muscadines!  This year appears to be a bumper crop.

I like to eat them right off the vine while they are warmed by the sun.  The muscadines are so flavorful.  They have probably 3 to 4 seeds in every grape, but that's okay.  We just spit them out.  I like to pick them when they are a deep red coloration and soft.  The harvest goes on for a while, so every day you can go out and pick some.

I was planning to go and pick some the other day, but Russ beat me to it.  We've been eating on these in the kitchen.  Tricia reminded me to be careful while picking as there is a wasp nest amongst the muscadines.  I don't want to get stung while picking and eating.  That would put a damper on the fun.

Tricia and I planned on going to the vines to pick this afternoon after work; however, we started visiting with the neighbors under their grape arbor and eating their grapes.  We talked and snacked on their grapes for so long, we didn't ever make it to pick from our vines until it was time to go eat supper.  Tomorrow is Friday.  We'll make time to go pick tomorrow or this weekend.