Picking peas and eating fresh

Many, many years ago, too many to really want to say (at least 40!) I took a job at a local farm in Worcester for the three months of my summer break from university. This way I would supplement my grant with whatever I could earn by picking fruit and vegetables. 

Where I worked was nearly all fruit so we got to eat, I mean pick, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, blackcurrant, red currants and of all things, peas by the 25 kg bag.

 Mange tout or snow peas weren't in fashion so we stripped fully mature peas from the vine; my aim was to pick twelve bags at least a day.

At first I was slow, I had to develop the knack and from watching those around I quickly became as fast as them. 

At 7am we would arrive at a field, find our rows (two each picker) and we'd start. By 4pm we were on the wagon to be dropped off around Malvern so we could walk home. It was a hard day's work but it kept me fit and each day I would bring home my takings to go into my tin.

What triggered this memory?

My garden today. Slowly I am creating my own organic vegetable patch where plants are grown in pots and I can 'enjoy eating the fruits of them' quoting The Orb.

This morning I picked a snow pea and crunched on its freshness.

Nope, there's nothing quite like it.

I don't feed the birds.....

I was making a cup of tea watching the sparrows as they darted from plant to plant, removing the spiders, the caterpillars and the green fly. They had their first batch of fledglings up in the tree at the bottom of the garden and darted from plant to tree, collecting then feeding.

Blue tits and great tits buzzed around too, looking for morsels suitable for their family and darting back into the hedge, came out only seconds later with an empty beak.

I picked up my binoculars and retreated to the living room.

More flowers here, so too the insect life. 

A field mouse who has, I suspect, created a nest somewhere under next door's decking, bounded along the wall only to vanish somewhere in the shrubbery. 

Do they eat snails? I'd been finding many an empty shell round there.

The blackbird with, I'm certain, a megaphone attached to his voice, boomed out to the world from one of the local roof tops whilst the resident robin hopped about displaying the red breast and chasing off those who would challenge him.

I haven't fed the birds. I've not created an artificial feeding station where a smorgasbord of grain is laid out for them, instead I've created an ecology where the insects are drawn back because the plants are drawn back because the soil has been brought back to a natural status.

I have four compost heaps, well two 'hot' bins and two slow compost heaps which do get hot but not so much as the bins do. 

The bins take the seed heads I dont want spreading too much because they are such thugs and would take over. It gets Amazon (thank you) cardboard, dead plants and roots as well as chipped sticks etc.

The heaps take the rest, the plants which have run their course, the vegetation from the kitchen and dead leaves in autumn.

Anything that comes from the land goes back to the land.

I picked up my binoculars. Some of the fledglings are beginning their flights, fluttering from the tree to the hedge. 

An adult sparrow flies towards the window, darts upward and removes another spider from under the eaves. That'll make a nice mouthful for one of those fluffballs, that's for certain. 

Opening the curtains.....

Well it's a first. No, before you think, I am not on a bus route and no, that's not a bus stop, but I will say one thing, whenever it arrived it parked beautifully.

I grinned and got in my car thinking back to when I was a child and had opened my curtains. 

I giggled. There was more than one occasion when I almost closed them again to check I wasn't seeing things.

 

I lived on the edge of a very small village in Bedfordshire when I was young. We were surrounded by farm land and to get to school we had a mile and a half walk. The houses were new for the day and each had the classic 50s layout of 3-bed semi with shared drive to the side, a garage, a side gate and a reasonably large garden. Because the way the houses were laid out, our road and the one adjoining us made a perfect rectangle of all gardens coming together with the houses acting as the outside perimeter. This layout is important to bear in mind for what transpired next.

It was late November and we had had a heavy frost once more. I could hear very strange noises coming from outside in the garden. It really sounded as though someone was killing something, but the insistence of the cry wasn't one of distress more one of courtship. I opened the curtains and peered through the frost to see several peacocks strutting around a peahen. We were getting the full works, the tails up, the tipping back of the head and the most unpleasant sound I have ever experienced coming from a bird's beak.

My mother came into my bedroom and we looked at these birds. Laughing, she turned and said she was off to knock on next door so as to use their phone; we could only presume they had flown over from the zoo at Whipsnade.

The keepers came and we were all entertained as these three birds spent a good few hours evading the nets as they flew from garden to garden. The keepers were forced to climb fences only to watch the birds flutter off to another shed or garage roof or distant garden which required a long walk round the block.

Just after lunch (they'd been chasing these birds for about three hours) they finally caught the hen bird and this made catching the males much easier; so full of testosterone, they wanted to mate with the hen bird and flew straight to the keepers hands. 

We didn't get a repeat of them, they had the feathers on one wing cut so the little angels couldn't fly out any more.

Another time and again it was coming up to Christmas because I remember it was cold, I opened my curtains to find a stag grazing on our lawn. If it had been a muntjac I would have been surprised but not that surprised as we had many roaming wild in the area, but this wasn't a small muntjac it was a very large and intimidating red deer. I looked at it, it looked at me. I called my mother.

"Mm, not the usual," was all she said, "be back in a minute," and with that she quietly opened the side door and went over to make a phone call to Whipsnade once more.

I smile even now as I watched this thing leap with such ease over the fences and gave the keepers such a workout. Took five keepers and quite a few of us to herd this thing into an area where they could catch him. No, before you think a dart would have been easier, the closeness of the garden fences meant he could have stumbled into them and hurt himself or worse still killed himself in his panic to get away from the dart as he became more drowsy, it just wasn't safe.

 

So, three events on opening the curtains, but I think the bus would have got the curtains twitching the most.