The New Testament clearly justifies getting rid of unproductive plants (see Post #G23-012, Luke 13:6-9 and the Chainsaw of Time).
I find no guidance on getting rid of excessively productive plants, just because keeping up with the harvest is a burden.
Tentatively, I’ll have to put such an act in the same category as wasting food. Which would make it a minor sin, as I was raised.
At any rate, I went out this AM to putter around my backyard garden. Forty-five minutes later, I was still bending over my 14-square-foot pea patch, picking the last of just over a pound and a half of snow peas. That brings the total for the year to about 4.5 pounds of peas. No signs of a slowdown yet.
I guess for talented gardeners, that would be normal.
For me, it’s unprecedented. Until now, peas have always been a placeholder in my garden, filling the space until it got warm enough to plant something productive. Better than nothing, but not by a whole lot.
I’m doing nothing differently, so it has to be the variety: Snowbird.
The joke here is that I chose these solely because I was too lazy to put up a pea trellis. The choice had nothing to do with supposed high yield. Snowbird was one of the few bush-type snow peas that would stand on their own, without being given a trellis to climb.
Sure, the Burpee catalog talks about yield: “Very early, erect, dwarf plants 18” tall produce amazing numbers of 3″ pods in groups of two to three.”
But you’d have to be an idiot to take that at face value. When’s the last time you read a Burpee seed description that said “treasured for their mediocre yield and so-so disease resistance”.
My only problem with this is that it’s throwing off my schedule. I have such disdain for peas, as a food crop, that I already scheduled this patch of garden to be re-planted to okra.
The okra seedlings are up, but the peas won’t yield. Or fail to yield, as the case may be.
As garden problems go, that’s a good one. So these peas are turning out to be the first pleasant surprise of the 2023 gardening year. Snowbird is now my go-to snow pea, and I would definitely recommend them to a friend.
