I’m sure most of
you are tired of me going on and on about how much I love stir-fried vegetables,
but I can’t seem to help myself. My love
of stir-fry is only exceeded by my love of growing vegetables for my stir-frys. These two things go hand-in-hand and make for
a healthier lifestyle. A little brown rice,
vegetables from my garden and some meat for flavoring and I’ve got myself a
cheap, tasty and healthy meal.
A great addition
to a spring garden and stir-fry is snow peas.
I absolutely love them! Since I
don’t use pesticides or anything else on my garden, I often eat a few of them
right off the vine as I’m harvesting them.
I don’t worry so much about bits of dirt on them. I just brush ‘em off and eat ‘em. (As my Momma would often say, “You gotta eat
a peck of dirt before you die.”) Fresh
snow peas are sweet and crunchy with a little bit of Heaven thrown in for good
measure.
So far this year
hasn’t been great for my green beans or asparagus beans, but my snow peas are
growing like gangbusters. I started
harvesting them last week and we had our first stir-fry with them. It was awesome! I have also frozen five or six packages of the
snow peas for later use. This morning, I
was out in the garden at 7:30 , picking another batch for the
freezer. I’m telling you, there’s
nothing more beautiful than looking at snow peas with the early morning sun as
a backdrop. Their bright spring green color
and the silhouette of seeds against the sun is absolutely amazing…at least it
is to gardeners and lovers of stir-frys like me.
Our garden beds
are 8’x4’ beds. We’ve had good rain over
the past few weeks, so our snow pea crop is bountiful. I’ve been picking the snow peas every other
day and that seems to make them happy…and, of course, it makes me extremely
happy as too soon the snow pea season will be behind us.
However, always
planning ahead for the next growing season, I am letting some of the snow peas
stay on the vines for next year’s
crop. I have tied string around the ones
I intend to save for seed. These
particular pods are big, have 7 – 9 peas within the pod, and do not have
blemishes on them. Just like people, the
healthiest seeds will usually produce healthy offspring so you’d want to save
the best in order to have the best chance for a good crop in the future. Ideally, the tagged peas will produce nice,
fat peas/seeds. After they dry on the vine, I will pull them off, remove the peas from the pod, and place them on
a tray to dry completely. Then I’ll put
them into an envelope and label and date them. (I don't know if this is the way everyone does it, but it works for us.) These seeds will be stored in the freezer with the rest of our seeds until
next spring when we’ll, hopefully, have…more snow peas, please!
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| Snow peas in the early morning sun. Now tell me that isn't one of the most beautiful sights on earth. |
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| Before freezing, I wash the snow peas and snip the ends off. |
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| Then blanch them (dunk them in hot water) for two minutes. |
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| Using my handy dandy FoodSaver to vacuum-seal them before storing them in the freezer. Yummmmmm! |
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