Plant your peas on St. Patrick’s Day….longtime readers of my blog know that every year, St. Patrick’s Day reminds me not of the good Irish saint nor of Irish things but of Mr. Hoffman, my next door neighbor in Floral Park, who taught me so much about gardening when I was a little girl. He was like an adopted grandfather for me and on St. Patrick’s Day, I’d race home from school to find him ankle deep in his old workboots in the muddy field next to his garage where he grew so many vegetables. He’d hold a paper sack in his left hand and neatly drop peas into long furrows in the mud. Weeks later he would knock on our back door and hand my mother a giant pot of pea pods. I’d sit on the back stoop and shell the peas, pushing the sweet tender peas into a collander so that my mother could rinse them.
One year, my elderly grandma who lived with us tried to cook the fresh peas in the pressure cooker. I do not remember this but my father told the story over and over again. Poor grandma either shouldn’t have cooked peas in the pressure cooker or she did something wrong because the steam blew the lid right off the pot, spraying green pea mush all over the kitchen! Took days to clean it out and I think my dad had to repaint the ceiling!
I write regularly for MainLine Gardening, a lovely upscale garden center and design service out of the Philadelphia area. Today’s essay is all about peas – from my memories of Mr. Hoffman to some tidbits and folklore I picked up by searching online. The photo today is stock photography from Morguefile.com, alas not from my garden. I have little baby onions peeking up through the soil today but I did not grow peas this year. Sorry, Mr. Hoffman.
Enjoy the essay – Planting Peas on St. Patrick’s Day.
I’m envisioning the green pea mess in the kitchen. Oh dear.
I’m planning to put pea seeds in the garden this weekend!