The Pea Project

These peas were planted yesterday. If the mice don’t eat the seeds, and the rabbits, groundhogs, deer and other assorted and sundry creatures don’t eat the pea vines, we’ll have peas. Hopefully lots.

But nothing in growing your own is a sure thing. Ever. Makes you appreciate it too.

This year is different for us. I guess all years are different, but we’ve been homesteaders a long time; we’ve pursued self-sufficiency a long time; but this is the first year we don’t have an outside job. We’ve long not been big going-out-ers but now there isn’t anyone “in town” anyway several days a week to pick this or that piddling thing up – we have what we have out here and that is it.

We’ve sold farm produce before, and I’ve had an egg trade for a good while now, but this is the year it counts a whole lot more because there IS nothing else. So we hope to produce way more peas than we ourselves can eat. They are a bit labor intensive with the picking, but they are something people will buy. These are, by the way, snap peas: They are great straight off the vine raw, in a salad, or steamed as a side veggie, or part of a stir-fry.

The idea here is to grow these peas and when they are finishing plant beans and let them use the trellises. See how it works. Hopefully make a little littling-along money. While improving the health of the world, the fertility of the soil, other stuff like that.

We have a mantra though: Feed thyself first. So we don’t sell anything until we have our needs met (or can see that they will be met).

Those corn haulms are last year’s hard red corn. And way in the background is husband planting more peas along the fence around the circle garden.