Soup Peas, Trellis' of the Ancient Ones

[steev]

All things considered, I just don't know why I don't just prefer food that doesn't have even possible caveats.

[steev]

Amplissimo Viktoria Ukrainskaya was one of my best last year. That doesn't mean I ate it; only had good seed increase. I have good sprouting this Spring and so hope for an excellent harvest.

My mother's kith and kin were all Germans from southern Ukraine; I think they maybe knew a bit about growing food, aside from Winter wheat.

[templeton]

Feb 26, 2014 2:15:30 GMT -5 steev said:

All things considered, I just don't know why I don't just prefer food that doesn't have even possible caveats.

Perhaps, on the face of it, balncing the weight of probabilities,you mostly make a fair point, Steev
(The only real reason I grew these out was to get the powdery resistance and the semi-leafless traits into my snow peas - and they came from a plant researcher I trust).
But back to trellises...
T

[Walk]

Amplissimo Viktoria Ukrainskaya is our favorite pea variety. We make hummus and falafel with them. Great with buckwheat wraps and sauerkraut (apparently in Jerusalem food vendors offer sauerkraut with falafel - must be a Jewish/Mid East fusion cuisine). In our humid summers, letting pole varieties of anything sprawl is the best way to make compost, but if it's a food harvest you're after then one must get plants up and into some air circulation. We have lots of pole varieties of beans besides the pole peas and for trellises we made them from cattle panels. We cut the 16' panels into thirds, leaving stubs for sticking into the soil. Then we cut each piece in half the other direction, using the stubs to bend around the other piece of the panel to make a hinge. With the bottom stubs stuck into the ground and the panel set up as a "V" looking at it from above, it is quite stable even in wind. We set up 6 of these hinged panels in a 20' long bed and tie adjacent panels together with some baling twine scraps to make a free-standing zigzag trellis. We have enough panels to put these up on 11 of our 20' long beds. Easy for one person to set up and take down, even a nearly 60 old woman. In the fall we stack them "folded" in piles. They should last our lifetime and probably beyond.

[ferdzy]

Walk, we've been growing Spanish Skyscraper for a few years now. It's a fresh green shelling pea, but it's our last one to ripen of the season, and once it gets too hot and they start turning tough, we leave them for dry peas. They are a big, round yellow dry pea that looks a lot like a little chick pea. I've been thinking about trying them for hummus or falafal - interesting that you've already been doing it. Our one attempt at chick peas so far was not successful, but peas do pretty well for us.

[diane]

From a Joy Larkcom 1980 article for the Royal Horticultural Society:

"Dry peas ... have never been widely grown in gardens. Even in their heyday in the Middle Ages and later they were considered a field crop,
often sown along with rye or strong-stemmed oats, on which they would climb. When overwintered they were sown with hardy varieties
of oats. 'Carlin' was probably the most famous of the old peas grown for drying."

She then went on to describe the recent development of leafless peas which stay upright by tangling their tendrils together.

[Walk]

Ferdzy, chick peas were a bust for us too but peas do great here. We usually harvest 10-15# each year from 2 of our 20' trellises. When cooked up with the spices, garlic and lemon you would be hard pressed to think you weren't eating chick peas.

[ferdzy]

Diane, yeah I can see that, especially since most of the older grains had much taller stalks. A kind of Euro-two-sisters thing. Walk, I still have my Spanish Skyscrapers, I will definitely give them a try in chick pea recipes.

[blueadzuki]

So it looks like I was kind of right about dry peas being mostly treated as more of a grain than a veggie.
Actually, there is a funny support for this (albeit a very unreliable one) Anyone else remember the lyrics of the old nursey song "Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley grow." (link in case anyone doesn't, a [href="http://"]http://www.kididdles.com/lyrics/o001.html[/a]) the song my be a little later than we are talking (it goes back to at least 1790, and there's evidence of it as long ago as 1630, but even that's way past the Middle ages) but the lyrics seems to suggest that oats,peas, barley and "beans" (probably broad (aka fava) beans, if the song goes back far enough) might have been generally considered "low impact" crops, ones that were fairly easy to grow.
Actually, now that I know this is confirmed, I'm sort of sorry I haven't got around to getting that barley from Kusa yet, the Tibetan mix. I imagine a barley that grows 7-15 feet tall would make an EXCELLENT pea support.

[steev]

Having had felafel made with garbanzoes and favas, I wonder how peas would be, or even beans; anybody tried those?

[raymondo]

Not felafel, but have made hummus or equivalent with beans, broad beans and peas as well as chick peas. All good.

[steev]

Excellente! I'll proceed.

[robertb]

'Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley grow.'

Could it be simply that these were the main field crops of the time? What crops were being grown in whatever context is likely to have produced the rhyme?

[blueadzuki]

Well, since no one know where the song comes from really or how old it is, there's really no way to say. But you notice wheat isn't on the list (or since we are talking about old England, "corn") Neither is rye. I never meant for the rhyme to be taken as autortatative proof (I mean it's a childrens play song and given that it has a dance with it, probably always has been) I just though the coincedence was worth noting.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

This week I am pruning a bunch of shade/ornamental trees, and figured that I'd like to grow my own bean poles, so I was reading about pollarding and coppicing. I ran across a new vocabulary phrase "pea sticks". They are like bean poles except shorter and the small twigs are retained. Seems to be a popular way of growing peas in England.

Images of Pea Sticks