... and the winner is ... peas

Now that we have more room for a garden I'm experimenting with growing a wider range of vegetables. At our old place we could really only grow things in pots so (after some failures with lettuces, pumpkins and capsicums) I mainly grew chillies, tomatoes and herbs each year. Canberra's temperatures can fluctuate quite a lot in spring so I'm trying to germinate a whole bunch of seeds indoors before planting the seedlings outside in November or thereabouts. A couple of weeks ago I sowed parsley, carrot, chilli, chive and pea seeds, and ...

... the pea seeds were first to sprout

followed by the chives. Today I sowed some basil, corn and tomato seeds. Really looking forward to honing my gardening skills over the next few years.

I feel a bit ... conflicted about trying to grow peas. Fresh peas remind me of a weird pea-related incident almost forty years ago. My parents, sister and I were visiting my maternal grandparents. You know how grandparents are supposed to be doting? Well, ours didn't get that memo. Not only did they not seem to like any of their six (!) children, they had packed up and moved to the other side of the country as soon as their children started producing offspring. Children were to be seen and not heard, etc. etc. On this day, my sister and I were told we could play in the back yard but were not to touch any of our grandfather's pea plants, as he planned to dry the seeds to grow the following year. We DIDN'T touch the peas, in fact we didn't go near the garden at all. On our next visit our grandfather took our father aside and (he later reported) said 'Your kids ate my peas!'

We told our parents that we hadn't. To this day I don't know whether they believed us but ... we didn't take the peas! It was around the same time that my home economics teacher accused me of theft, and I wasn't guilty that time either.

How rude.