It’s a fantastic time of of year here, it’s time for our shelling pea harvest! This is truly a labor of love for us, shelling peas are likely one of the “least sensible” things that we grow.
We’ve observed a little bit of variability in our pea harvest time, it can be anywhere from three weeks and all the way up to our first frost. You generally know it’s time to harvest your shelling peas when they become quite plump. Often times, the earliest peas will start to dry up a little bit as well, which is a definite sign that you need to harvest your crop. If shelling peas are allowed to dry in the pod, they can become bitter and will defy the tasty, sweet peas that you’re going for. So, harvesting them on time is a good idea!
Shelling peas aren’t the easiest thing to work with. While it’s easy enough to pick the pods, the labor that goes into shelling them is quite high. At the home level, mechanical shellers don’t make a lot of financial sense and the cheap ones aren’t that good. So, for us, it’s just a lot of labor to crack each pod and extract the peas by hand. Considering you can buy a 5 pound bag of peas for like 8 bucks, we’re literally working for hours at a fraction of minimum wage. This equation is often worth it for flavor and/or nutrition. But, with peas, we haven’t found a major difference between commercial and our home grown varieties other than perhaps the homegrown pride.
At least for me, shelled peas are “the vegetable” that I can remember first liking in life. My parents convinced me that they were “Pac Man pellets” and after that, there wasn’t a pea left on the plate ever again. To this day, it doesn’t matter how many peas are on the plate, I’ll finish them all, every time!
But, we do enjoy growing shelling peas and the labor is kind of meditative. As we performed our shelling ritual this year, we were struck that there are people out there that have no idea how food is produced. Peas are likely one of those things that some might not grasp, since they’ve only ever seen peas in their final form. It truly makes us appreciate the connections we’ve made to producing our own food, there’s no mystery how it all comes together from beginning to end.
We could likely just go directly into freezing our peas, without first blanching them for long term freezer storage. In a 30 foot row of densely planted shelling peas, we’re not typically producing months worth of supply. (Nor would we want to shell significantly more peas by hand!) But, we usually tail our pea blanching effort into one of our other preservation efforts, so we’re all ready set up to do it. This season, we dovetailed our peas into our cauliflower preservation. It’s also peace of mind, just in case our peas find themselves in the depths of the freezer only to be uncovered next spring.
There are a few things we grow, simply out of pure passion. Shelling peas are one of them for us. We’ll probably do it forever as there’s just no other replacement quite like them!
