Prolific piles of peas

When I think of gardening, I think of my mother first and foremost, but I also think of her parents. I used to love visiting them when I was a little girl. The sun always shone in my grandparents garden and my memories are all of riotous flowerbeds full of colours and a lovely birdbath. I remember how my grandfather would get us outside, wearing aprons to pod peas perhaps, or running races around the grass. It was a lovely place. Flash forward to our garden here and now and peas were something I wanted to grow in large numbers. Not so that I could freeze and then cook them (commercial peas are frozen in the fields now and so it’d be hard to beat that kind of process) but so that I can eat them raw. I’ve always loved fresh, sweet peas straight from the pod, and the flowers are so pretty too. So peas were some of the first things we sowed in the spring. I didn’t do succession sowing simply because I wasn’t sure when the raised beds would be finished, so the correct crop is likely the only one we’ll have until next year. But I can live with that because every little pea is like a taste explosion! We sowed Petit de Provence, Alderman and some mange tout (Oregon). The pigeons took our entire Petit crop in a single night. No exaggeration, we went to bed happen the knowledge that dozens of tiny pea shoots were happily snoozing in their raised bed. In the morning all we found were a few tiny puny stumps where the shoots had been pecked off and some noticeably fatter pigeons burbling down at us from the trees. But the other two beds (immediately decked out with CDs for protective reasons) appear to have survived. I didn’t actually get near them for the first couple of days because our oldest son would strip them bare, podding and eating the tiny sweet peas right next to the raised bed! I’m so pleased that we moved here. What a lovely childhood he will have here in the countryside. I love that he can potter about in the kitchen garden, digging when he’d like to, harvesting food that takes his fancy. I really love living here. Peas for the win!