Peas, peas everywhere - The Accidental Smallholder

Posted: Sunday 27 June, 2004

by Dan at 4:40pm in Growing 1 comment Comments closed

I continue to harvest early peas. The Douce Provence are cropping moderately, but the Pilot are cropping very heavily, and although the former were of a cropping size about a week earlier, the weight of the Pilot crop and the fact they are still covered in new flowers makes me think these will become our regular early pea. There is little to pick between them in terms of flavour.

So today's pickings yielded about a pound of shelled peas, popped straight into the freezer in a suitable container. There are a lot more to come, so maybe we will be self-sufficient in garden peas the coming year.

The other peas which continue to outperform expectations are the Sugar Pea Norli mange tout. I picked a good couple of pounds this afternoon, which were blanched for a minute and a half and frozen on a tray before decanting into a plastic container for freezer storage. This is a good tip for freezing many crops - for example raspberries and blackcurrants - and allows you to remove small portions rather than being left with a single massive ball of frozen veg. These too are covered in flowers, and were sown successionally so we can look forward to a prolonged and heavy crop.

There's more coming too. We've had our first few raspberries today, and the blackcurrants are nearly ready to pick, at least a first pass for the early ripeners. Both have cropped heavily. A quick explore under the early spuds revealed some good sized Red Duke of York tubers, we'll start lifting these to eat this week.