After yesterday's heaviness, which drew a grand total of zero views, I am as promised moving along to a meditation on the lowly zipper pea, one of the few crops that will grow happily in the sandy soil of Taylor County.
Back in the spring we planted a kitchen garden out in front of Splinters, with the help of our friend Dean and his late-60s vintage tractor that had been his father-in-law's during another season of life. We planted okra, peanuts, eggplant, melons, sweet and feed corn, weird elongated chinese beans, melons, and zipper peas.
Before long we had a field of tiny plants popping out of the ground. I'd show you a picture of that, but the only one I could find has Peggy in the middle of it drinking a glass of wine, wearing only work boots and what appears to be one of my dress shirts. Better to keep this blog family friendly, although I'm not sure bare legs would alarm the censors.
The okra was ready to pick first, but the zipper peas weren't far behind. By the time we were into early summer heat, we were awash in the things.
Of course, weeds thrive on fertilizer just the same as vegetables, and as you can see it was a constant battle to encourage the intentional plants and eradicate the squatters in the garden. P read somewhere that geese were a natural herbicide, and would eat the weeds in the garden if you just let them wander in there.
This was, in retrospect, very bad advice. Geese are herbivores, and do in fact eat weeds. They prefer, however, nice leafy plants and their produce. Like, say, zipper peas. And watermelons. And cantaloupes. And eggplants.
It became a daily ritual for Peg to walk the rows with a bowl, trying to harvest as many zipper peas as she could before the geese got them. This meant picking them a little green, rather than waiting for them to fully mature and turn an off-white. Meanwhile, all of our melons fell prey to the seemingly insatiable appetite of the geese. All that's left now to harvest is the occasional eggplant, which always bears the telltale saw marks of a goose's bill. The other day I actually saw Gus dashing across the yard with an entire eggplant in his mouth, being pursued by the other geese and a couple drakes eager to share in the heist. So much for our foray into gardening, at least for this season.
As any real Southerner will tell you, your fun is just beginning when you pick zipper peas. Next, it's time to gather at the kitchen table and shell them, which is a very time consuming process when they're green and don't want to give up the peas without a fight. Peg had a five gallon bucket of the things, and would sit every morning while I was working in the office filling ziplock bags with peas and dropping them into the chest freezer. The little ones she'd simply snap and mix with the shelled peas. If I wandered into the main house looking for coffee, I'd find myself briefly enlisted in the exercise, until I recalled an urgent phone call I needed to make and escaped back to my computer. One can only handle so much of this sort of fun.
You'd have to ask Peg how to cook zipper peas. In my youth my mom or Aunt Alice would boil them in a pot with bacon or maybe a little salt pork. That might be a little pedestrian for a kitchen guru like P. She cooks them until they're tender but firm, which I far prefer to the gooey, pasty, overcooked presentation you get sometimes at a meat-and-three lunch counter.
Both of us are still working back in the panhandle today. I'm guessing Almon is just now letting the guineas and the chickens out of the pen. I forgot to tell him to be on the lookout for guinea eggs, but reckon he'll figure it out.
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