How Does Your - Peas, pickles and pothos

What do I do with all these peas? I don’t even like peas. I only planted them because they promised to grow quickly and I was fairly positive that I couldn’t mess it up, and both statements turned out to be true. But I was so good at it that I now have what feels like an abundance of peas that my coworkers are not picking up. And yes, I know that my skills weren’t a factor nearly as much as the weather and hardiness of the plants themselves, but just let me have this. Back to the peas. I have a few options: I can blanche them for a couple of minutes and freeze them, let them crust over in the back of my freezer until I notice them three years later and glance at them fondly before throwing them away. Another suggestion was to turn them into a puree to be used for sauces later. I’m going to be honest, this sounds like a terrible idea, especially for someone who doesn’t like peas. I don’t think mashing them into baby food is going to improve them, so I took them home and made the tiniest portion of peas for the husband to eat with his dinner. He said they were tasty, and I’ll take his word for it because I’m not putting one in my own mouth. My carrots don’t have quite the same sweet flavor that they had when I first started pulling them, and I’m wondering if I may have left them in the ground for too long while I was waiting for them to get to the recommended size for picking. Lesson learned there. I yanked the rest of them out of the dirt and that’s the end of the carrots for this season. Our beefsteak tomatoes are beginning to get large and change colors. I don’t care for those either and if my teammates let those go bad there will be dire consequences. In addition, the cucumbers continue to be delicious and I’m excited to know I have something in my arsenal that will turn out well even if the plants struggle initially. There are a ton of flowers still popping up on the vines which means that we should have plenty of cucumbers in our future. To celebrate an abundance of carrots and cucumbers, I made refrigerator pickles for my (guinea pigs) coworkers to enjoy. I peeled and cut four cucumbers into rounds and about 10 medium- to small-sized carrots into thin sticks. I threw those into a container with two cups of white vinegar, two cups of water, three tablespoons of sugar, two tablespoons of salt, one tablespoon of black peppercorns and a couple of tablespoons of celery seeds. The original recipe called for minced garlic, but I couldn’t find it and Kelly Schmidt suggested celery salt anyway. Those are marinating in the fridge as we speak. If we’re all still standing by next week’s issue, you’ll know they turned out okay. Since we have a bunch of containers all full of soil, I went ahead and planted our radish seeds which have been drying out in a dark cabinet for a couple of weeks. This time I won’t let them get away from me and I put it down on my calendar to start keeping my eyes peeled for radishes by September 10th. I also began hunting for kohlrabi and spinach seeds to start outdoors, the last crops I’ll put in the ground this year. So far I haven’t found any seeds, but I’ll keep hunting. I still have a smallish window, and we’re not afraid to force that window open and keep it propped up with our hopes and dreams if it tries to close on us, right? And it was a busy weekend at home thanks to some of our four-legged companions. I woke up on Sunday morning to find that my large monstera plant had been knocked down from the top of a fairly tall cabinet. There was dirt scattered all over my dining room and my poor monstera looked as though she’d been hit by car. Unsurprisingly, all three cats feigned innocence and lawyered up immediately. Because I already had a massive mess on my hands I grabbed a bunch of pothos vines I’d been propagating, some empty terra cotta pots, and a bag of soil and plopped down to garden right on the floor in my dining room. I put three pothos babies into pots and started propagating two more. I have a pothos addiction because I love their hanging vines and they’re nearly impossible to kill, even for me. I will admit that my monstera has been in desperate need of thinning for a couple of months so the cats probably did me a favor, but I do not have confidence with any household plants except for pothos, so I’d been putting it off. Some of the monstera’s stalks were pretty damaged and those went into my compost bin, but my mom suggested putting some of the healthier limbs in water. I rinsed those thoroughly and put them in a vase to see what happens. This is a total experiment for me; the only thing I’ve ever done with my monstera is water it, and I successfully repotted her once. But in this case I didn’t have anything to lose and I hacked off a third chunk and threw that in some soil too. Here’s to trying new things, even if it’s against my will. Mandee Ellis is a reporter at The Star News. Contact her at Mandee@centralwinews.com.