Peas, please! - Friday 3rd April 2020

Young pea plants of the variety 'Homesteader', grown by Marty

 My wife Marty has taken me to task for calling the garden I share with her 'my' garden in this blog, although of course it belongs to us both. Like many homes with two keen gardeners, we each have our own parts and our own jobs. Marty manages our handsome front garden with the help of our skilled gardener Geraldine, and raises most of the vegetables, which she plants out into raised beds. I manage the grass, the hedges and shrubs, and the mini woodland I call the wilderness.

Honour where it is due, today's subject is peas, both as a vegetable and as flowers, and Marty has been busy with them. In the photo above you can see a tray of young pea plants in the greenhouse. The variety is an old one called 'Homesteader', which Marty got on our visit to the US last year - it's not a name I recognise on this side of the Atlantic. It is a heritage variety dating back to the early 1900s, and clearly still popular in America. Marty is delighted with the high germination rate. I look forward to picking and eating fresh peas in a little over 2 months, just cooked for a minute or two with pleanty of farmhouse butter!

My Grandfather, Jocelyn Waller of Prior Park, grew peas in the 1960s for the Erin Foods factory in Thurles, like many other local farmers - sadly the plant has been closed for many years. They had to be harvested by a contractor at exactly the right time and sent to the factory to be frozen within hours. Do you remember the Birds Eye advertising jingle, "Sweet as the moment when the pod went pop"? It was the same idea. I remember the anxiety in the house as harvest time approached. Were the peas ready? Could the contractor be got in time? Would the peas obtain the desired price at the factory? I'm not sure, but I think he soon decided peas were too much trouble as a crop, and stopped growing them.

Marty's Sweet Pea plants waiting to be planted out

Marty is also growing Sweet Peas in the greenhouse, as she does every year - the seeds were planted in the winter, and as they grow tall they are chopped to make sturdy, branching plants, to plant out when the danger of frosts is past. They are always wonderful, and during the season she picks large fragrant bunches for the house and to give away - I call her "My Sweet Pea Queen of North Tipperary". She says for the year that's in it she wants to concentrate on vegetables, not flowers, but I hope she finds a good place so that these strong plants don't go to waste - a summer without sweet peas would be no summer at all!

An empty garden

Joakim’s garden feels empty again – the four grandsons and three daughters have all gone back to their own homes, variously in Kilkenny, Wales and England, leaving behind them very happy memories, many photos, and a large pale patch in the lawn where the tent was pitched. The big boys – Cal, Finn and Gabe - came for a week’s sailing tuition on Lough Derg (with Shannon Sailing - I can heartily recommend them). They had a super time I think, and certainly plenty of wind! Little Jonah came with his parents to be shown off and run charmingly around the garden. I felt sad to see them go, reminded of so many goodbyes said, but very grateful indeed that they should have come so far to visit Dad or Grandfather/Grandpa/Oompapa on his own turf. The jury is still out on what Jonah will call me: I prefer Grandfather, because that was what I called my mother’s father and I value the sense of continuity, but there are those who feel that sounds too Victorian and cold – I can’t think why, because though older than I am now, my Grandfather certainly wasn’t.

Flower-fairies - Jonah and Grandfather in Susanna's Labyrinth

Happy Jonah!

Boys make a sandwich (t-b Cal, Gabe, Finn)

The Tent

I've not been good at blogging the garden this month (mea culpa!), but here are some pictures of the garden in August:

Susanna is the sweet-pea queen of North Tipp!

Day-lilies and white Agapanthus

Blue Agapanthus

Coppery Sunflower

Salvia patens - a gorgeous gentian blue!

Salvia cacalifolia - I have a bit of a thing about Salvias!

I have managed the vegetable garden better this year - here we have leeks, brassicas (Brussels Sprouts and Purple Sprouting) with asparagus, potatoes, climbing beans and artichokes behind. Susanna's peas were most disappointing, but we are now dining on our own potatoes, French beans and spinach-beet, and freezing for the winter.

The most beautiful flower in the garden

It is raining gently as I write this, looking out over Susanna's labyrinth garden, so full of colour and variety of form. The sweet peas for which she is famous, grown this year up a half circle of canes around the famine pot, have not been picked for five days and are a riot of colour - I must pick them this morning, to keep them blooming. The tree-mallow which I cut down to the ground in the spring has bounced back and is now a blaze of shocking pink. The day-lilies she got from a specialist nursery in Britain are in full blow, varying in colour from lemon yellow, through orange, to salmon pink and a rich, deep red. And the flower-buds of the blue and whit agapanthus are just begining to burst.

But the most beautiful flower is not in her garden today - Susanna is in the Galway Clinic. She had hip-replacement surgery last Monday afternoon. It has gone well, thank God, the surgeon is pleased and she is cheerful. Although the wound is sore, she says the pain is much less than with her previous knee-replacements, and the pain she has been feeling in her knee has gone away, proving that it was referred from the hip, great relief to her. On Tuesday she was got out of bed to walk on a zimmer frame to the loo, yesterday she was able to swing her own leg out of the bed and sit in a chair and walk more, and today I think the physio will start her on crutches. Her main complaint is that they will not let her shower until Friday when they change the dressing!

In a little while I will drive back to Galway to be with her, and I shall be able to bring her a bunch of her own sweet peas and a punnet of her own strawberries, though I expect I shall be soaked if the rain doesn't stop!