Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Um...whoopsie?

I spent most of the day inside today. Didn't even take my morning walk around the garden because I was busy with Other Things, namely the Things that are supposed to be refilling my Etsy shop and/or coming with me to craft fairs in the very near future.

Not that I'm freaking out or anything but dog-DANG, you know, when I ordered the dyes and blanks the numbers didn't seem that big...but when I'm washing and sorting and ironing and planning and folding / banding / tying?

It's a lot of yarn and fabric.

But actually, I'm digressing. (I have been up since 3:15 [a.m., ya smart-alecks!]. Rambling is probably going to happen. Repeatedly.)

After I got home from picking up the Female Denizens, I suddenly thought, Oh! The garden! I haven't walked the garden today!

I have this vague feeling that without my daily support, everything will die. That's right! Nature has far less to do with the bok choy thriving or the broccoli not-so-much thriving as does my daily stomp through the yard inspecting the process or lack of same in each of the beds.

So I scowled at the broccoli beds (of twelve plots, only two have broccoli coming up). I plucked caterpillars off the Brussels sprouts and the broccoli. I informed the moth who was obviously laying eggs on them right there in front of God and Everybody that I was so going to be killing her babies later.

I thinned the carrots. It pained me, but I learned from the last stunted crop that it is important.

Then I spent some time poking at the beet bed. Parts of one row are thriving, parts of another are thriving...and the spaces between are like scorched earth. Hmmmmmm...

Fertilized the pumpkins up front. Got the leaves off the spinach up front. (We had a small wind storm, and the tree in front of the Den let loose so many leaves it looked like an ocean of the things, all over the lawn, driveway, pumpkin patch and spinach bed.)

Cooed at the bell peppers, and grabbed two for dinner.

It was supposed to be a pork soup made with carrots, bell peppers, onions and peas grown right here.

And it was.

Except for the peas.

WELL. Actually, there were some peas in there.

A few peas.

Like...maybe...ten of them?

SEE, what happened was, well, I was out in the garden? And there were a bunch of peas ready to pick, all swollen up and lovely and perfect?

And so I gently cut one off the vine just like the gardening book said to and then I looked at it and thought it just looked so darned pretty and I wanted to see the peas so I split it open and hey! There they were! All green and smooth and perfect and I wondered how they tasted and...uh...wellllllllll...

I sort of maybe kind of stood there in the garden shelling peas and eating them as fast as I could for a little bit? Because they were sweet and delicious and just a little bit crunchy?

And then I realized that basically, I'd eaten more than half of that first wave of peas and then I told myself that nobody would mind because it wasn't like the Denizens liked peas anyway and the carrots would suffice.

But I put the pathetic remnants in the soup anyway because...well...they were there.

And now my children think I am either the toughest broad EV-AH, or really, really sick and in need of some kind of intervention...because I not only ate peas, I ate them RAW, right out of the shell!

(They have no idea, NO IDEA, what they are missing. Thank Dog, because if they did I might never get another pod of my own again...)

6 comments:

Steph B said...

Oh my....I can just picture you standing there furtively shelling and eating peas as fast as your hands and mouth will work. Too funny! Somehow I doubt that the Denizens would have challenged you for those peas, but it never hurts to be careful, eh?

Lisa said...

Fresh peas eaten right in the garden are the best. In fact, that's the only way I'll eat them. Or I would, if I had a garden...

I feel your pain about the stuff for the Etsy shop. I'm looking at several pounds and cones of silk caps, merino, tussah silk, and laceweight yarn. AAAAAAAAA!!!

ccr in MA said...

Oh, I love love love fresh peas. I buy them at the farm stand by the pound in season, and call them dinner. Yum!

Can't wait to see the fruits of your labor, too.

RobinH said...

*G* I'm remembering the first year my mother had a garden. And how she complained that she got almost no green beans. What she didn't find out for a couple of decades was that every day her seven-year-old (me) was out there snacking on them....

Science PhD Mom said...

My kids eat just about all of our peas fresh from the garden. There are no home grown, home cooked peas in this house. They all disappear into my kids' mouths. And I'm okay with that--I'm just happy they eat them!

Kris said...

When we were kids - we had a ubergarden and both peas and green beans rarely made it to dinner. Between the kid doing the harvesting and the beagle, both eating them straight from the bucket there just wasn't a lot left over.