Live and Learn

I think we all learn something every day. That's just part of living. Sometimes it's big, and sometimes it's small. From time to time, I think that I should do a regular feature here about things I've learned, you know, because I have Live and Learn in the name of my blog. However, my follow-through is not always the best.😏 But today, I'm going to make it happen. Here it goes. Some things I've learned recently.

It took way too long to put this sticky straw
around the tomato plants.

1. Straw made for covering up grass seeding is very sticky. Occasionally, we buy a bale of straw to mulch around various plants. Last fall, we bought a bale at our local Southern States like we always do. However, it was very difficult to pull apart. Annoyingly so. It turns out that we got straw coated with something sticky to be used for seeding, so that it won't blow away. You can be sure that we will be very careful when we purchase straw again to know what kind we're buying.

Costco chicken

2. Costco's Kirkland Signature brand is 30 years old, and the worldwide celebration for this is happening at a Maryland depot. (Knowing these kinds of things happens when your son works there.) I think the most popular Kirkland product is the $4.99 rotisserie chicken. Costco sells enough of them that they raise their own chickens, and last year, they sold over 157 million. However, I consulted with Theo, and he said that if you didn't count gasoline, the most popular item is probably toilet paper. :)

3. Speaking of Costco, their stores are called warehouses, and their distribution centers are called depots. Theo works in a depot. I confused the two when I first learned this.

It's been over a month, and
I'm still waiting on this parsley to sprout.

4. If it's important or takes a lot of prep work, it pays to use newer seeds. I planted 6 packages of old seeds, and only two (seeds, not packets) of them sprouted. There were some flowers, some veggies, some in pots, some in the ground. All of these were a hopeful experiment, and luckily, the lack of results is not of much consequence. On the things that really mattered to me, like tomatoes, I used newer seeds.

These peas have been good both for pod eating and shelling.

5. Peas come in purple and yellow varieties. Uncle Billy gave me some extra pea seeds he had that have purple and yellow pods. I've only seen green ones before. The peas are doing well (new seeds), and it's fun to see the new varieties.

This is what the peas look like on the inside--more like the peas I know.

Well, nothing earth-shattering in this list. It's funny how I know that I'm processing new information all the time, but nothing much came to mind as I was writing this. Maybe I should keep a list. We'll see how I do with follow-through on that. 😀

Until next time...

P is for Peas

 

Picture it. It's 2 am, and peas are flying all over the kitchen. Let me set the stage for this scene.

When I was growing up, my father raised huge vegetable gardens--an acre or more. We lived in Town without a very big yard, so friends would let him use land on their farms for his plantings. Every evening after work, he would go tend the garden, and sometimes, my sister and I would join him to work on our jobs - weeding and/or picking. But our main job was when we got home - processing the produce.

When we were younger, we helped our mother and learned the ins and outs of proper canning and freezing. When we were older, we did all of the canning and freezing since our mother worked long hours at her nursing job. We knew that when freshly picked peas or corn came into the house, they had to be frozen (this was preferred over canning because of taste) as quickly as possible because the natural sugars in them started to change into starch as soon as they were picked, degrading the quality. 

So it would go something like this. After an evening in the garden, we would start washing and shelling peas around 9 pm. When we got enough peas shelled, one of us would start blanching them while the other kept shelling. After the blanching, we would cool them in a big dishpan using ice we had frozen in orange juice cans. Then, they went into containers and into the freezer. This would go on until we finished, usually until the middle of the night sometimes.

If you would like to try one,
 I found this on eBay.

We'd then go to bed and get up the next day to handle whatever else there was that hadn't needed to be processed immediately. And so it went. That was until one day when my mother bought a gadget that she thought would help - The Magic Fingers Sheller.  It was a yellow plastic box that hooked up to a hand mixer.  The mixer ran two electric rollers that you fed peas through. The rollers would squeeze out the peas in one direction and the shells in another. And it worked, except when it didn't. Sometimes, the peas would get stuck, and you would have to retrieve them and restart the process. Other times, the peas would fly out of the rollers and land who knows where. 

At first, my sister and I found the stuck and bouncing peas very aggravating, but as the night wore on, we found it funnier and funnier. As those peas ricocheted around the kitchen, sometimes we laughed until we cried. I guess you had to be there to really get it, but those late nights with my sister and the pea-sheller are among my favorite memories of growing up.