It's so wonderful to see how the kids enjoy helping out with the peas.

What an energy boost! I finally managed to get a hold of a few hundred pictures from last summer, from a memory card I thought had been completely wiped. The little culprit (dressed in purple in the top picture) was meddling with my memory card and it was suddenly unreadable. I went to a specialist and managed to retrieve some of the material, but not all of it. But I'm happy about the pictures I did get back. I get those summery feelings whenever I look at the colorful pictures of my children with the bright green peas!

Peas are one of the few vegetables that this little guy actually enjoys. He also loves fried soy beans, snap peas and sugar peas.

I harvest the pods when they get slightly wrinkled and I feel that the peas fill out most of the pod.

All of our children enjoy touching and playing with the peas and beans. My smaller children like to move peas and beans from one jar to another with a spoon. It's a great way to improve their fine motor skills!

Fresh and frozen peas

The picture above shows last year's harvest of green peas, or garden peas. These are the regular kind that you can get from the frozen food department in your convenient store. They are very easy to grow and taste great!

A while back, I got a question about how we eat our green peas here at home. I might be a bit boring, but I think that the best way to eat them is boiled with some butter. Everything tastes great with butter after all! But we also use green peas in many of our regular dishes. Green peas are great in for example meat sauce, fried rice, omelets and soups. You could also make a really nice pea hummus simply by mixing the peas with some vegetable oil.

I was able to freeze around 17 pounds (8 kilos) of peas last year. I grow on a limited space but I still get a large harvest!

You can also dry your green peas and use them just like regular yellow peas.

I really want to try deep frying some peas as a snack. Has anyone tried it? I have a deep fryer I got as a birthday gift last year and my kids thought it could be fun to cook green peas in it. I will let you know when I try it!

The peas we eat now come straight from the freezer. I freeze them by first parboiling them in lightly salted water and rinsing them in cold water. I freeze them on large trays covered by baking sheets. This will give you individually frozen peas that you can put in a bag or box.

Read more about growing peas here: Growing snow peas

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I hope you enjoyed these summery pictures as much as I do!
/Sara Bäckmo