Peter Leibert's Page

GARDEN FRESH PEAS

When I was a kid, peas was one of our favorite vegetables - to eat! That applied to kids and adults and we often ate them straight off the vine when they started getting ripe. The eating part is what I enjoyed, but there were other parts of the pea story. Every year, as fall grew near, Dad would take one of our horses out into the field, till the soil, and lay in three or four long rows - I mean real long - about 300 feet each. The planting of the peas was always “the boys’ job” and my brother and I would spend much of that day placing thousands of peas into the ground about 4 or 5 inches apart down these rows.

Today there are a large number of varieties of peas, but in my youth green peas all looked alike, round and sweet, and encased in a large, bulging, grass-green pod that was not edible. It took about two months for the pea pod to start showing up and after that every other evening you would be out there picking peas.

During season we had fresh peas every night and twice a week the family would have a shucking session where we had a production line for shelling and preparing the peas for canning. They called it canning, but actually we cooked the peas, sterilized some glass bottles, put the peas into the bottles. Then down into the storage basement they went to wait until we had them for a dinner or traded them with our neighbors for another type of “canned” food.

As an adult I have discovered another type of peas that are easier to grow and prepare. They can be eaten as whole tender pods without shelling. This new favorite of mine has an edible-pod and includes snow peas, sugar peas, and China peas. A major advantage of the edible-pod pea is that you can grow them from late Summer to late Spring where we live. Most of these peas do very well on trellises, which fits in well with the ten-foot rows I use for my backyard gardening.

To grow well, peas usually prefer that they get a lot of sunshine in the area where they get planted. They also desire rich soil with good drainage. Young plants will get off to a much faster start if you work some fertilizer into the soil before you plant your seeds. I also suggest that before planting, you soak the seeds in water overnight. This will speed up the germination. In the winter months around Southern California, it takes about 60 days for the first harvest to emerge. It is usually best to consume the newly harvested peas within a day or two after their being picked.

For the regular green garden peas, rinse the green pea pods just before shelling them. Pinch off the stem with your fingernail and pull the string down the length of the pod. The pod will pop open, then push out the peas with your thumb.

For snow peas and sugar-snaps, rinse well before use. Prepare snow peas by snipping off both ends with a kitchen shears, which is perfect for this job. Sugar-snap peas are prepared by snipping the ends and removing the strings from both sides of the pod. Eat raw or cooked.