Pea Pickin' Good Time

Today I picked peas for over 2 hours.  I only had 2 rows, about 50 feet long, but I guess 100 feet of peas is plenty!  This evening I am starting to pod them out to put in the freezer.   The pile on the table in this photo is about 3 feet long, 2 1/2 feet wide and a foot high.   This should give me quite a few quart bags of peas for the freezer.   I probably won't get them all done tonight, but I'll get a good start.   There will be more peas in a few days, too, as I only picked what was ready.   When you have pollinator bees, you have lots of garden veggies!!
     This is sure a busy time for us now!  I also spent 3 hours mowing grass today.   So I spent about 5 hours out in the sun.   I certainly got a good dose of vitamin D, eh?  Also cucumbers are coming in now, so I've been busy making dill pickles and bread and butter pickles.  Our market day on Thursday keeps us busy, too.   Last week we picked 35 lbs of green beans, 10 lbs of yellow beans, many, many zucchinis and cucumbers, and peppers and cabbages and fresh herbs.   It usually takes us about 4 hours of picking to prepare for market day.
     The other day Harold dug up about 30 lbs of potatoes for me, so I'll be canning those also.   And as if we aren't busy enough - this coming Friday we are pulling the honey supers on our beehives and on Saturday we will extract honey.   We anticipate a big honey harvest, somewhere around 400 lbs. 
     So if I don't put many articles on here for a while, you know I'm very busy!   But this is a good kind of busy.  We are so blessed with wonderful vegetables and everything else.   Even our apple tree is producing many fine apples.   But the deer are eating them before they're ready, so Harold put an electric fence around the tree this evening to stop that!   Those deer are NOT going to eat my beautiful pie apples!

Just getting started on a huge job of podding out peas!  Yes, peas are a lot of work to pick and pod, but fresh garden peas are SO worth the trouble!  We love Pea and Cheese Salad, Creamed Peas and New Potatoes, and Fettuccine Alfredo with Peas, just to name a few of our favorite dishes with these lovely peas.  We also love them with fresh mushrooms as a side dish.