Picking and Shelling Peas

• Who can find a virtuous woman? her price is far above rubies
• She is like the merchant's ships, she bringeth her food from afar
• With her hands she planteth a vineyard

A couple of weeks ago I showed ya'll my parent's garden. Then last week, I had a post on my food blog about how to put up peas for the freezer--blanching, shocking, bagging, the whole nine yards. 

This week, I want to show you the in-between. How to go from this...

...to this!

You start by picking the purple and turning-purple peas....this is my mom showing off her bucket.  (As I mentioned in my post on getting them ready for the freezer, she has threatened me if I show her face.)

Daddy always keeps a big tub at the end of the row to dump your bucket into.  When it gets filled, he just brings another tub.

Once all of the peas are picked, the next step is double washing of the peas still in the pods.  My folks have a double sink installed in their garden shed just for the purpose of washing vegetables. 

Sometimes Mom likes to speed up the process by using the garden hose to fill the dishpans up faster.

First one side, then the other.

The peas get swished around in one pan of water...

...then again on the second side.  It gets off the dirt, bugs, dried blooms, etc, and makes for a cleaner process once they're shelled.

In the olden days, when I was a girl, I can remember sitting outside under the trees, shelling peas by hand with my mother, grandmother, and anybody and everybody they could press into service.  Your fingers turn purple and your thumb gets sore from using your thumbnail to pierce the shell (pod) and start it separating.  It was a long, drawn out process when you garden on the scale my parents and grandparents have always done. 

These days, though, my mom and dad use a pea sheller.  I can't remember when they first got this, but I know it;s probably close to 25 years old.  The motor turns a belt attached to rollers that kind of "squish" the peas out of the hulls.

One person can operate the pea sheller, but it really works fast if you have two people, one on each side, feeding the peas through.

You take a few peas from the stack and feed the ends under the guard, where they're grabbed by the rollers.

The peas come out underneath, here....

...and the hulls come out the front, where later on they'll be fed to the cows. (Did you know that you can't feed butterbean hulls to cows, because of the little sharp ends?  But the cows like pea hulls, and they're safe for the cows, too.)

All of this happens while being watched over by their mean guard dog. 

And last, but not least, Daddy weighs the shelled peas on this old scale.  (The scale came out of the country store that my paternal grandparents owned and ran for years.) (By his calculations and experience,  a bushel of purple hulls peas-in-the-pod comes out to 9 pounds of shelled peas.)

So how is your garden growing?

Until next time... 

This post is linked to:

The Creative Home Acre Blog Hop at A Cultivated Nest

Make Your Home Sing Monday at Mom's the Word

Clever Chicks Blog Hop at The Chicken Chick

Garden Tuesday at Sidewalk Shoes

Bloomin' Tuesday at Ms Green Thumb Jean

Tackle It Tuesday at 5 Minutes for Mom

Outdoor Wednesday at A Southern Daydreamer