Saving Pea Seeds, Part 2

I admit.  I yelled.  I swore.  I scared my visiting in-laws.  What sort of witch had their brother married?!  Is she yelling about peas?

I was.

My husband has a bad habit of “cleaning” the messes of others before he attends to his own mess.  He’s pretty sure that whatever I have left on the back porch is garbage and he’s more than happy to pitch it for me.  We’ve discussed it.  He apologizes.  I try not to raise my voice when I point out that he COULD begin cleaning the back porch by starting with his OWN messes.  In twenty plus years of marriage, we’ve had this discussion often, yet I refrain from lacing his morning cup of coffee with strychnine.  He thinks that I am overreacting.  I think he’s lucky to still be living.

My husband threw out the peas I’d been saving for next year’s seed.  A plate of drying peas on the back porch just looked like junk, so he tossed them.

“But you still have peas growing in the garden.  You can save more,” defended youngest brother.

But those peas were the best and the brightest of my crop, nice pods from prolific vines, with eight or nine peas in each pod.  I was raising a super race of peas.  It was my Darwinian experiment of the season.  I was selecting seed from the most productive of peas.

“You could just buy new seeds in the Spring,” sighed middle brother.

Of course I could.  But that wasn’t the point.  I was enjoying my role of Earth Mother-Crazy Survivalist, living self sufficiently from my little corner of the world.  Buying seeds wouldn’t have been nearly as fun as saving my own from my favorite vines.

So I took a deep breath, refrained from doing bodily harm to my husband or his brothers, and started over.

I kept all the peas that had begun to “go to seed”, that is, pods that were beginning to wrinkle, pods that held peas too big to be tasty, and pods that had begun to dry.  Pea season was over.  We had lived through a week of record-breaking heat.

All pea pods went back to the back porch to dry on plates.  Once a gain, I BEGGED my husband to leave my stuff alone, not matter how junky it looked.  The pea pods dried.

This morning I popped the peas from their pods and sorted them.  I threw out all that looked underdeveloped or moldy.  I also threw out pods that held only one pea.  I sorted peas into bowls, according to how many peas were in each pod.  Most had four or five peas, but I am pushing for perfection here, I was most interested in the pods that had six to nine peas in them.

I tossed the pods and the reject peas and returned the pea seeds to plates.  They’ll dry further for a week on the back porch.  Pea seeds from the higher producing pods are separate from the ones with fewer peas per pod and marked to distinguish between the two groups.  There aren’t a lot of seeds, but I may have enough 6-9 peas per pod seeds to plant my short peas for the bottom bed of the garden.

Next year, my Darwinian experiment will continue.  I am hoping to find a tall variety of peas I like as much as my “Early Frosty” peas.  Pouring over seed catalogs is a great way to entertain myself in Winter.  It calms my nerves, makes me less likely to growl at my husband.