The Modern Victory Garden

Like so many other things this year, the pea patch has been very slow to reach harvest maturity.   However, the patch was finally ready for picking when I checked on it Friday night.   The annual pea harvest and then processing them for freezing is a rather long process.   It takes just a little over two hours to harvest all of the peas, approximately another two plus hours to shell them (with two people working steadily at it), and a few more minutes to blanche and freeze them.   Essentially, I need about a five-hour block of time and my husband’s help in shelling them to get this yearly harvest completed.                                                          

I had a morning commitment to keep on Saturday so my first inclination was to put this job off until Sunday.   However, when I woke up very early on Saturday morning and could not go back to sleep, I decided to just make use of that time and tackle the harvest a day earlier than my original plan.   So at 5:30 am, I headed out to the patch and got the harvest underway.   I grow a pea variety (Dakota) that matures the peas at relatively the same time so that it is convenient for freezing.   I harvest the peas by just removing the pea vines from the bed and stripping the pods off as I go along.   The pea vine is added to the compost pile, and after I am all done the bed is ready for a succession crop to be planted for fall/winter harvesting.   The first of the next photos is quite dark as a result of the very early hour.      

The pea patch before I began the harvest.    Now your see it…..               

…. and 2 hours and 15 minutes later - now you don’t!                            

I will be removing the horizontal trellis wire mesh and putting it in the shop for storage until next spring, but I am planning to leave the frame structure in place.   The next thing to be planted in this bed will be some direct seeded onions for over wintering.   I am hoping to get the bed cultivated and planted up on Sunday.             

This is my third year of using my horizontal trellis system and the first year of the second-generation of this horizontal pea trellis.   Every year I have used the same amount of growing area (4-foot by 12-foot) and my results have always been excellent with this approach, but this year was my best to date.   I ended up with over 18 pounds of peas from this harvest!                  

Once I was done harvesting, I put the bucket of peas in the kitchen; hurriedly got cleaned up; and then headed off to the Kingston Giving Garden to put in my usual hours of volunteer work.   When I arrived back home later that afternoon, my husband and I split the peas between us and worked on shelling them as we watched a movie together (Spirit of St. Louis).   We ended up with just over 7 lbs of finished (shelled) peas from the 18 pound bucket of peas I harvested.   The last step in the annual process was for me to blanche the peas in boiling water for 90 seconds and then immerse them in an icewater bath to stop the cooking process.   Once drained thoroughly, the peas were then placed in gallon Ziploc freezer bags and put in the freezer.      

Another successful pea harvest concluded and the winter supply of peas is well stocked.                         

Laura

kitsapfreedomgardener