Pea Pickin'

The garden has not faired well this summer with all the rain.  In fact, when I look back at last year's produce records I was hauling 20+ pounds of produce out of my garden by this point, not this year...  My sweet peas did really well but they never make it into the house in abundance for shelling because my children use the rows of peas as their go-to snack when they are out doors.  Between the peas and the random raspberries they always have a healthy snack on hands and even visiting children get curious about the pods that my children readily break open and pop little globes of goodness from, so much so that the visitors will often sit down right along side my kiddos and happily munch away.

Sadly though the time of the peas is done so we headed out to pull up the withered plants, harvest the "too big" pods where the pea "seeds" for our next planting were, and make room for bush beans as I planted those right away in the same spot that we just pulled the peas from.

we even had help from our resident farm cat, Odie.

My littlest one even came to "help" though he was more interested in still trying to eat the peas then pick them to save for planting.

Finally the pea-row demolition was completed and we took the pods in to dry for a few more days (did I mention the rain???)  After drying the pods on a cooling rack that I sent on a cookie sheet (don't make the mistake of putting damp pods directly on a cookie sheet like I did with my first round...they will rot when you do that!)

We then shelled out the peas and let those air dry a few more days and viola!  I have my next planting!  I am going to try for one more round of planting this year in hopes that we can get some peas to save this fall, peas like cooler temps so I will likely try to plant these in September and see what transpires.