Since we’re now triaging our preservation efforts, let’s discuss one of those crops that provides us little wiggle room! Snow peas are one of our favorite crops, both for fresh eating and preservation.
Snow peas a very consistent 60 to 70 day crop. Once they mature, it’s important to harvest them as soon as possible as they’ll tend to grow bitter and husky if left on the vine. There’s sometimes a small amount of maturity variability, so we tend to pull a full harvest towards the “end” once most of the peas are fully developed.
We’ve tried lots of varieties of snow and snap peas over the years, but keep coming back to our favorite. The Oregon Sugar Pod II was developed out of Oregon State University and it throws down for both taste and being a prolific producer. Just a 10 foot of trellis easily pulled in a couple pounds for us and that’s after quite few that we snacked on or used for meals!
You might have heard of snap peas and perhaps wondered what the difference is between them and snow peas. In our view, they are very similar and not easily differentiated, which has even confused many actual botanists. But, traditionally, the snow pea tends to remain a bit more flat and features thinner side walls than the snap pea. Both these peas are traditionally eaten whole. In Europe, both snow and snap peas are sometimes called “mangetout” for the French phrase that basically means “eat all.”
The blanch and freeze preservation method works well here. Since we’re often putting these peas into stir fries, sautés, soups and and other dishes, we can just dump a bag into our dish and be done with it. The blanching helps retain the nice crisp and crunchy exterior, even after long term freezer storage.
We’ll often portion out a handful and store these into inexpensive sandwich bags. We’ll then combine all of these smaller bags into a single gallon size freezer bag for quality freezer protection. This is a slightly more economical approach than entirely using freezer bags and it typically works well for crops where we’re portioning smaller amounts.
Our new “preservation area” is all ready paying huge dividends. About 30 minutes into this preservation, it started raining pretty good. Oh, how nice it was to kick back in our chairs, dry as a bone. We’re really appreciating having a covered area to help keep us and our preservation efforts out of the elements!
Though we’re definitely going to miss snacking on these every time we walk by the pea trellis, we’re also excited about the many meals we’ll make from these over the winter months! It’s nice to have another preservation down and one less thing we have to worry about in coming days!
