Growing Peas at the End of the World
or, We Just Kinda Have to Keep Going, You Know?
Yesterday Minnesota had the honor of having the worst air quality in the entire world. The color of the sun in the morning is always my first indicator that we have a hazy day ahead of us. When you’ve experienced wildfire smoke blowing into your city for 10 years or so, you recognize these things. The sunlight is a sickly orange hue, like off-brand macaroni and cheese. Then of course there’s the smell, which is off-putting and smells like burning chemicals. I tell my kids, who are all 6 and younger, that there’s fires up in Canada and the smoke is blowing down and covering our state. I try to tell them this without broadcasting my own alarm and hopelessness, that this will be our new normal for summertime, and something they will be encountering for the rest of their lives.
Yesterday I also harvested the first of my peas.
I wasn’t much for gardening or yard work or any kind of outside work when I was growing up. I’m irritable in the heat; I don’t like getting down on my knees; the beating sun is my enemy, etc. When my son was young and we lived in our first house, my husband Alan built some garden beds and filled them with vegetable starts from the garden store behind our house, and that summer we had a modestly abundant source of wholesome foods. I had an heirloom tomato for the first time, and I realized that tomatoes could be good. I made fridge pickles with cucumbers and basil from our front yard. This is heavenly, I thought.
We moved houses in 2018 and had garden beds put in in late 2020. During the growing season of 2021 I was pregnant with our third baby and tired. Alan planted the garden once again. We had a decent little supply of Roma and cherry tomatoes, jalapeños, basil, cilantro and parsley, and then a surprise bumper crop of kale we harvest in October. I froze the kale in little pucks to be added to soups that I’d have while recovering from childbirth later that fall.
2022 I tended 3 tomato plants, a few peppers, tomatillos, some not very successful herbs, some cucumbers that never produced, beans that got eaten by rabbits and that was it. It was the first season I really tried to be a gardener and I was out of my depth. I thought I had read up on everything in the weeks leading up to the sowing season, but looking back I really knew almost nothing. I’d had a grand vision which amounted to… not much.
I came into 2023 determined to be a gardener despite shoddy experience. I ordered my seeds early. I made charts, I made schedules, I checked the soil, I laid compost, I got down on my knees to plant neat rows of peas, spinach, radish and other cool-season crops in the appropriate time window, covered my beds with garden fleece and waited patiently. I did nothing but stand by and occasionally pull back the row cover to check on any growth. Eventually little green buddies erupted out of the soil. I diligently thinned seedlings. I went to a huge plant sale with a plan in hand.
And food is growing.
I decided to make growing food my project when the anxiety of living on a warming planet became overwhelming. I was consumed by fears of societal collapse, and knew I had to change the way I moved through the world. I spent last summer reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and it was life-changing. If I can grow my own food, I thought, that is security. That is stability. That is action. It’s not solving climate change, but I have more tools for facing the future than I did a year ago, and a year from now I’ll have even more.
Last night I pulled a handful of peas from the vines and, realizing I didn’t have much for any sort of meal or preservation, popped the pods open and ate them right there. I never had peas that fresh before, and they were delicious.