Planting Peas

I wrote this post in 2009, and somehow it got stuck as a draft. I'm posting it now because it's so sweet to read about little Oliver, not yet two, now that he is so solidly located in "kid" and not a baby or even a toddler any longer. Love the saying: "The days are long and the years are short." -2011
Planting peas has always been one of my favorite things to do, and something I loved helping my mom with as a child. Something about the way you poke holes in the soil with one finger and drop in the pea, the feel of the damp, cool, early spring earth on your hands.... Anticipating the sweetness of a fresh pea, crunchy snow peas, juicy sugar snaps, the pling of shelling peas dropping into the bowl.

Today Oliver helped me plant peas. A toddler helping with such a task is very much like letting the wind do the planting. You may end up with all your seeds in one little section of the patch and the rest of the bed converted to a railroad track for small wooden trains. It will be so interesting to see what comes up where! Regardless, Oliver loved helping, and I loved getting to share this with him the way my mom has shared it with me.

After a row or two of peas, about as much as my patience could handle, we worked together on preparing a new bed for strawberries. This Oliver really loved. I dug with the pitchfork while he sat in the middle of the bed with a little yellow plastic trowel and a blue bucket, sorting through the earth and putting stones, clods of dirt and roots in the pail. The sun was warm on our backs, a flock of finches sang brightly from the bramble hedge a few feet away, and the wind sounded like a river high above our heads.