One of my mother's favorite expressions is "all ye of little faith" --- it's in reference to me, mostly.  Every year, I plant an early bed of peas around Valentine's day.  And every year, I give up on the bed less than a month later and replant it.  As a result, I'm never quite sure whether the Valentine's peas came up, or whether what I'm seeing is the later peas.  This year, I got smart (though no more faithful) and marked my early row of peas, planting the replacement row a couple inches to the side.  So I could tell that both rows of peas came up, and that the Valentine's row came up a week earlier than the March row.

Now what do I do with two rows of peas where one is supposed to be?  Just as I was pondering this problem, I dropped by Eliza's awesome blog and learned that young pea shoots taste similar to snow peas.  Just what I needed to round out the first completely-from-the-farm salad of the year!  Lettuce, pea shoots, baby kale (wintered over), and the last of the fall carrots melded into a delectable side dish.  Last year we lived on salads for the entire month of March, but I say better late than never!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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