Today I've been dedicating more time to the garden, which has been nice. I've been giving the pea plants some love because they grew in a really bad way since I didn't have enough support structures in place.
I know this isn't proper support but it's what I can do at the moment as cutting all these branches and peeling them (don't want to be uprooting newly formed willow trees later) is very time-consuming. At least there will be lots of material ready for future gardens.
In the yellowish area you can see the consequences of not having enough support as they grew towards the fence and climbed on each other, drying up many plants in the process.
It was one mistake after the other that led to this situation, but I understand it's just lack of experience and also that I need to attend to many different things, so sometimes stuff just gets postponed.
I like taking care of the plants that feed me, whether they will offer more fruit or not. So I've been going one by one (lots of work for I must have hundreds of pea plants) and helping them on to some support, as well as taking off the dry leaves and watering. I do this mainly out of pleasure as fixing and healing anything/one helps me heal myself. I suppose that this could encourage the plant to give off more while the weather allows it but I don't know if that will happen.
Anyway, I did my first pea harvest for storage. I don't have any proper storage facility yet so this is mainly to experiment, learn and gain experience. I looked up info on what the best way to dry them was and one of the methods was with the oven, which seemed adequate for me, as I am always lighting the stove to cook anyway, so why not use that heat that is usually lost?
Let the works begin! I usually do things like peeling or other repetitive things while listening to some spiritual/psychological talk on YouTube. I would love to check things out on 3Speak but between my slow internet connection and the bad loading times of the platform it's impossible for me. Anyway, do you know of any deep spiritual/psychology talkers on Hive? Grateful for any guidance.
It was nice to open up the pods and see how loaded they were, as well as how big the size of the peas was. Despite the setbacks, it seems this will have been a pretty successful growing. There's ton more to harvest, but as I explained, this is for leaving purposes mainly.
I took some of the pod shells and put them in water to ferment. This is a popular drink in Chilean jails 🤣, "pea cider", but why not? I think it's traditionally prepared with cooked shells but I've gotten so good at fermenting that I have big confidence I'll pull it off just fine with them raw.
Once peeled I put them into the oven and left the oven door slightly open for the moisture to go out.
The process was supposed to take nearly two hours but I think that must be for gas ovens that keep a constant heat. Here the fire varied it's intensity because I would go out and do other things and forget about for some periods of time 🥲
As a result of forgetting about the oven, some of the peas got roasted 🤣 but it's not a big deal, as long as there's a low moisture content they will be preserved. Also, they don't taste half bad as a snack to reduce eating anxiety during the day. The last part of the drying I had the oven door fully open and I'm planning on trying the next batch this way through the whole process, even if it takes a bit longer to dry them.
It turned out to be a small amount but that's ok since it was just an experiment. I don't think I can do much more than this in the oven anyway so it's not a final solution. I need a property dehydration setup but being realistic, I don't see that happening this summer as there are already plenty of other things on the list.
What's your tech for dehydrating your harvest? Can your method be applied without electricity and on a budget (yes, very specific question 🤣). Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for stopping by!