🌿 Pea harvest season all over Panama 🍃 almost everyone has a yard full of pea's 😎 Life is Good

🌱 As soon as the dry season starts the Pea bushes start to flower and produce pea pods in volume. And they continue to produce for about a month.

Pea's are super easy to grow and the bushes become quite large so the recommended planting distance is 6 feet apart. After the rains start around June just make a small hole and drop 3 dried pea's in and you're done. It pays to mark them with something so you don't cut them down when small and cutting the grass.

So for the next few weeks just about everybody has a container of sorts on their lap full of pea pods to break open and release the peas. The shells are fed to animals or used to fertilize other plants.

🍃 It's a slow and tedious process but large portions of life here is spent just shooting the breeze in a shady area and everyone does their part mindlessly opening pea pods while doing something else. So the rule of thumb is, If your hands aren't busy with something else, pick a bucket of peas and get busy.

I heard the City folk were paying up to $10 a pound this year for cleaned peas!

🌿 Everyones favorite are fresh but if you leave them dry on the bush they can still be cooked later or saved for seed. They are much easier to clean when dried also, just put the pods in a sack and beat it with a stick to separate them. And if you planted many bushes it's hard to pick them all fresh and clean them.

The dried seeds get 100% dry on tarps in the sun, then usually put into old rum bottles where they can be stored for years. I'll do a blog about that process maybe next month.

Here is what they look like on the bush, you pick them when they start to show a slight yellowish ting.

Here is a good example of all the stages from flower to almost ripe pods.

🍃 We must have a couple dozen bushes planted around the yard, So as time permits picking, cleaning and adding peas to the menu will be an almost daily event for a month or so. Life is good. 😎

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