Peas, Please!

For as long as my kids can remember, Mr. Mulch has grown vegetables.  And as far as I can remember, for most of their childhood nothing green would pass their lips.  It wasn't for want of trying, and the irony of their avoidance was not lost on us.  Back then our garden was easily three times as big as it is now, and we grew everything from Asparagus to Zucchini, and every alphabetic veggie in between.  When they were little, they turned up their noses at each and every one.  It didn't matter whether I served them raw, steamed, fried or sauteed, if it weren't for fruit and various gummy vitamins, I'd have raised kids with scurvy or rickets.  

Some of their avoidance tactics were truly admirable -- and far more sophisticated than simply pushing greens around the plate or slipping offensive stalks to the dogs.  One of the most memorable was the prestidigious carrot caper.  It appeared that the one quasi-veggie we could get my older daughter to eat was baby carrots -- "quasi" because they're really orange bullets milled from the trunks of  carrots large enough to choke a horse.  Every time we put them on her plate they disappeared.  

Until the day she had to practice her clarinet immediately after dinner.  As she warmed up -- literally as well as musically -- she removed the sweatshirt she'd been wearing during her meal.  As she pulled it over her head, all the baby carrots dexterously palmed and stuffed up her sleeves flew all over the room.  Turns out carrots were also on her hate list; but she'd been using sleight of hand for months to avoid revealing this truth.  

To this day, I don't know what she did with all those spurned carrots.  The dogs wouldn't  eat them either, so I only hope they didn't wind up moldering in some random closet to be discovered by the lovely family who bought our house.  Maybe that's why they no longer speak to us.  Hmmm.

Back to the veggie aversion.  The first small triumph came with peas -- and that amazing process called growing up.  But the peas came first.  Even my kids couldn't resist the sweet crunch of sugar snap peas straight from the vine.  It was also fun to play hide n seek looking for the really fat pods -- then perfecting the technique of folding the end over to zip the strings off both sides simultaneously.  Then we introduced shell peas -- both bush and climbing varieties, and we were even able to convince one or the other of the girls that it would be fun shelling them with us -- much like Tom Sawyer painting that fence.  Then the next daring step -- serving them cooked.  That was taking it a bit too far initially; that turned it into suspiciously grown up food.  But eventually they came around.

In fact, they eventually -- and enthusiastically -- came around to most of the garden produce.  But they still look forward with special delight to pea season.  And what a pea season we'll have this year!  Mr. Mulch put in 5 full beds of sugar snaps and shell peas -- both bush and climbing.  And with the cool spring we've had, they're looking extremely happy and healthy. 

Long view of the garden beds; the vertical netting
is a jungle jim for the climbing peas

Happy peas getting ready to climb

Bush peas with radishes planted in between rows.

That's going to be a lot of peas!  While we do try staggering the planting so they come in over an extended period of time, they always seem to gang up on us and find a way to mature all at once, creating a frantic 4 week period of stringing, shelling, blanching and freezing.  

At this point, however, we can only gaze at them with yearning and anticipation.