The Next Generation of Peas

Like much of life, not everything about growing food, is happy, peaceful, and fruitful.  Even those who claim to have a green thumb are likely to make an occasional mistake.  Gardening does allow you to try and try again until you get things right.  This year we planted snow peas indoors in early January along side our wonderful trays of spinach, lettuce, and assorted other greens.  The greens are doing well but the peas are dead.  You might conclude from this that peas are difficult to grow, but you would be wrong.  In fact, growing snow peas is easy.  The "root cause" of our trouble (pun intended) was that the peas grew much, much faster than the rest of the seedlings.  In an outdoor garden under sunshine this is no trouble, but beneath the artificial grow lights of our system, the peas quickly became taller than their neighbors.  Had we raised the lights to accommodate the peas, the rest of the seedlings would have suffered.  Winter prevent us from putting the peas into the ground, and the recent snowfall has destroyed our hoop house once again.  So in a weak attempt to remedy the situation we moved the peas to the basement where they soon became neglected.  We will plant snow peas again, in the spring, in the ground, as we should have done in the first place.  And we vow to learn from our mistake and enjoy organic snow peas for years to come.

You might conclude that that is the end of the story, but you would be wrong about that too.  The root cause of the unfortunate snow pea neglect was that the neighbor has planted a sort of pea of his own, that is, he is expecting an addition to the family this spring.  It is his first offspring, I might add.  Preparation for the arrival of the youngling has the neighbors' minds on many things now that compete with gardening.  Without complaint we look forward to his arrival--we know it is a he, in fact--because it means we soon will have another hand to turn soil, pull weeds, and water the plants.  Just kidding, of course.  My advice to him, should he read this blog in the years to come, is to learn from his mistakes, no matter how few they are, and to resist the temptation to plant snow peas indoors.  Congratulations, Neighbor.