Harvest #2 - Peas and Lettuce

Dwarf Grey Sugar Peas and three kinds of lettuce (Merveille des Quatre Saisons, Ruby and Lollo Rosso)

I picked all of these veggies this morning. The peas come from those beautiful flowers I showed in my first post.

Here's another close-up look at the peas:

Dwarf Grey Sugar Peas, lightly sauteed in olive oil and tossed with garlic

Many other gardeners whose blogs I read wax rhapsodic about the taste of fresh peas from the garden. Maybe it's the variety of peas I'm growing or maybe by tastes are just different, but I actually was underwhelmed by the fresh pea taste. It was not as tender as I thought it would be and the pea taste was not as pronounced as I had imagined.

But just toss those peas in a little olive oil (pinching off the ends first), saute them for a minute or two over medium heat and finish with a little ground garlic and the difference is astounding. Melt in your mouth tender. Sweet and succulent.

I actually asked my wife if she had added any sugar while she was cooking the peas, but the answer was no. Just as with the spinach, it is the cooking process itself that brings out the sweetness in the peas. (But then I guess that's why they are called sugar peas!)

As for the salad, it's a combination of three kinds of lettuce - Merveille des Quatre Saisons, Ruby and the delightfully-named Lollo Rosso (no relation except in homophony to the beautiful Italian actress and artist Gina Lollobrigida).

I'll have more to say on my success - or lack thereof - growing lettuce in an upcoming post...

Welcome!

Dwarf Grey Sugar Pea flowers

Welcome to my garden!

I do not lay claim to any great expertise. This is only my second year attempting to garden in Middle Tennessee (zone 7a) on a piece of land that is mostly clay.

I have made a lot of mistakes. I'm sure I'll make many more.

I hope this blog will be both instructive ("Here's what I did. Don't make that same foolhardy mistake!") and inspiring ("If I can get these results on a windswept clay hilltop, imagine what you could achieve in your own garden!")

So...to begin with the peas!

I planted my Dwarf Grey Sugar Pea seeds from High Mowing in mid-March in a base of clay with mushroom compost and pine fines worked into the soil. Not the ideal seed-starting medium you'll find recommended in gardening books.

And yet, they grew splendidly through conditions that whipsawed between wet and dry, hot and cold.

Frugalista Gardener has a wonderful post on these peas - their edibility, their beauty, how to cook them and how to save the seeds so that you can have a self-sustaining garden.

I don't think I can add much to what she has written, except to say that these peas will also grow and apparently flourish even without a trellis.

(Why didn't I just build a trellis and grow pole peas? Many reasons, but chiefly the fact that I excel at the twin skills of research and procrastination. I spent hours researching the topic online, couldn't decide what would be the best and most effective trellis to build and so ultimately settled for dwarf peas that were advertised as not need a trellis at all.)

Of course without a trellis, two of my pea rows have comingled. I'm not sure how I'll ever find the peas in the middle...