Can Garden Peas Cure Global Warming?
April, 2010
Recently I received a hand-written card from the other garden-obsessed Barbara, the famous one, Barbara Kingsolver. She was thanking me for a small favor, but it was her postscript that sent out the best vibrations: My peas are up, hooray! I’m sure BK won’t mind me quoting her on that.
Those of you who are personal friends will be happy to hear that Mom is doing better so I’m back home on the Blue Ridge, and my peas are up, too.
I may not have enough peas, but then again I may have too many. I couldn’t bear to tear out all of the rye and wheat that I planted last fall as cover crops, so in two beds I thinned the grains and interplanted them with snow peas and snap peas. This is an old trick wherein the peas grab onto the upright grains as they climb toward the sun, which should work especially well with compact varieties. But what if it doesn’t? The only studies I could find said to shoot for less than 20% grain, but since then the wheat and rye have doubled in size. In case my adventure turns into the best grain/legume cover crop evesnr, I decided to plant a standby crop of long-vined snow peas in their very own trellised bed.
These spatial-companion-planting-intercropping complications and their associated anxiety may have kept me from feeling really excited about my emerging peatopia. Then it happened. When Roger walked through the door announcing that it was too late to stop global warming (the last thing he’d heard on commuter radio), I was instantly comforted by a wave of the peas are up euphoria. Oh, dear, well at least the peas are up, I thought, and continued cooking dinner.
The peas are up means that the garden has reaffirmed the wonderful thing we do together when we put seeds into fertile soil and help them grow. Truthfully, much bad stuff can go down and it will be okay when you are able to say that simple phrase. I hope your peas are up, too.
