Peas, favas, and Arikara beans 23 June 2009

Pods of pea 'Golden Sweet' ripening on the 12th: One of the most unique things about this pea is that the areas of the plant right around the flowers/pod are also a golden yellow, as you may be able to tell in this photo.

I harvested 11 peas this morning, the most yet (by 1 pea).  There were 10 more snap/sugar snap peas as well as the first shelling pea.  This cool, rainy weather has slowed flowering, but there are many peas already ripening on the vines.  It looks like there will be several more shelling peas ready soon.  The weather seems to have especially negatively affected ‘Golden Sweet,’ and I am wondering if this is because my stock came from a market in India (according to Baker Creek’s catalog) and perhaps it finds this weather especially unfavorable as a result.  There are also many fava/broad beans ripening now and it looks like the first couple are almost ready to harvest.  The fava beans seem completely undaunted by the weather, still putting out flowers daily and they appear to have more pods ripening each day as well.  The Arikara beans (cultivar ‘Yellow Arikara’) have started flowering!  I noticed it this morning, but spent very little time in the garden yesterday so it could have begun then.  They are only a couple of feet tall.  (They are bush beans)  I hope the coming heat wave does not kill them before they can produce anything like happened last year.  For those that have not read previous entries (or missed the relevant ones), Arikara beans are rare in that they actually prefer relatively cool weather despite being beans.  Hot summers typically kill them.  They were developed by the Arikara tribes of what are now the Dakotas in the US to produce in the short seasons there.  They can be planted earlier than any other garden bean I’ve yet found.  I have no idea why sources (even most of those selling them) typically do not mention this fact as I find it the most valuable thing about them.

My plans to work in the garden like mad (before the coming heat wave) have been hampered by this weather.  It’s so incredibly humid and misty that I got sticky just harvesting the peas and checking on the other crops!