Sweatpea


Homegrown fresh-from-the-garden peas

My mom has always had a garden. And from that garden, for every summer in my memory has come a bountiful harvest, or at least enough vegetables for a bunch of plentiful salads throughout the summer months. Lettuce (usually a few different types), carrots, green onions, tomatoes (of course), radishes, cucumbers, green beans, and my favorite: garden peas. As a child, I would sit on a towel at the swimming pool or scabby-kneed under the shade of a backyard tree or with my shirt off in the recliner chair and in my lap I an enormous bowl full of peas that I would devour the in an afternoon. Now of course, the peas have to be eaten fresh, uncooked, straight off the vine. Cooked pees are pretty much gross, in fact most cooked vegetables are pretty much gross. To this day, homegrown peas, fresh off the vine, remain one of my most treasured summertime snacks (right up there with frozen grapes). When I lived in Platt Park I grew my own, fairly successful, batch of pole peas. Last night I got myself a big old bag of peas from my moms garden. My bag is much smaller because my brother, Pandy, and I, immediately started gorging on the yield and didn’t stop till we were half way through. We slowed down once we realized that my brother was going to be the winner of the “most peas per pod contest” with a grand nine peas. Not to mention I was hoping this bag would last me through the weekend but I’m beginning to become doubtful.

9 thoughts on “Sweatpea”

  1. my mom calls me sweetPea. do you eat only raw foods? that is supposed to be really good for you–I was gonna try it–they just opened a raw foods restaurant in my neighborhood.

  2. I guess Sweet Pea is a name for Moms to call girls- mine still does it! My Dad had a huge garden- my brother and I used to draw a line in the middle and have dirt-clod wars with the dirt that clumps up after it rained. Carrots straight from the ground, with a little dirt on them taste better than clean ones. And fresh tomatoes taste like an entirely different vegetable than the ones the grocery sells. Great memory! And great pea-pod pic!

  3. Haha- sometimes one of those dirt clods would have a rock in it- I’d throw two that would go ‘poof!’ when they hit him, then the third, which would go ‘clunk!’ Then it would really be war!

  4. that’s a great story allison. i remember getting into little wars with my brother and soon enough somebody would get hit too hard and things would quickly escalate into a full blown fist fight.

  5. i’m sorry to spoil all of your nice childhood memories, but i like using the nickname sweetpea because of the sexual connotation it can hold.

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