Pea picking

It's time to pick peas again. It is our first try at growing them and we do not have a very big patch. Enough for eating a meal about once a week. Next week I will be planting Romano pole beans on this trellis in amongst the peas. The idea is when the peas are about finished producing for the season, the beans will be up and growing, thus utilizing the trellis twice. We haven't tried this before, so we will see how it works.

We also had some broccoli that needed to be picked. Broccoli - it's okay in small quantities, but it is not our favorite, so we don't plant very much and don't freeze it. One of the first times we grew broccoli we cooked it up and enjoyed it. A few days later my mom asked me if we had soaked it in salt water first. No...well, she highly recommended it to kill the worms on it next time before we ate it. Yuck!! I always soak it now. Except for today. 

 

There were so many worms on this head of broccoli that the chickens get to eat it for dinner instead of us. It got moved outside on the porch. I also picked a few onions. 
 

We try to eat what we grow and preserve regularly. That doesn't mean we don't have a box of chicken or a can of soup occasionally. This evening we had the peas and onions with some chicken we canned last summer. The rice was cooked with chicken broth that we made from the chicken. That was a good learning experience. We put too much water on the chicken bones and parts so the broth is rather weak, but still good to use in a meal like this.

 The chicken is a little tough because the birds were older when we butchered them, but the meal turned out to be very tasty. There is rice chicken and peas left for another meal tomorrow. We are blessed with abundance.