Purple Pea Flowers: Cross Pollinating With Purple Peas

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It's getting dangerously close to the end of my second apprenticeship here at Stone Barns Center.  I have seen and worked on incredible projects from my first days with Matt as a green volunteer, still believing that carrots grew in the back of a supermarket, to the Captain handing me the keys to the greenhouse back in December.  Relationships with the space, the plants, myself and others. Exploring internally, emotionally pushing myself through false walls and expanding into a capacity I never realized I had both physically and mentally.  This journey has been one of unlearning and learning, hiding from demons and slaying them face to face.  I hold each one of these experiences close to my heart.  Experimenting with these beautiful pea varieties has definitely been one of the more all-encompassing learning experiences on the farm.  I propagated them, built the trellis, transplanted them and have watched them grow.  Over the last few weeks, they finally began to flower and that means it's time for us to cross pollinate the two purple varieties (Caruthers pea and Sugar Magnolia pea) with the green Oregon Giant snow pea. In this process, we select a host or female flower, which will remain attached to the plant we would like to produce a seed pod.  The male flower will be plucked off of another plant and used solely for its pollen.  Peas have what is known as a "perfect flower" which means it has...

Pic of the Week: Oregon Giant Snow Pea

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Our first Oregon giant snow peas.  The warmth in the propogation space makes all the difference as our one pea plant has already started to produce flowers and seeds.  Sweet, tender and delicious as advertised.

Pea update

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This weekend we truly welcomed in spring with the first 12 hour day of sunlight.  The movement and pace on the farm is changing.  The work days grow longer and I've started to finally feel how connected farming is to nature.  My schedule is very much a product of the sun, the moon and the earth, among other factors.  It was not all that long ago, I was fighting to get in my last transplants or soil bed preparations finished by a 4:30pm sunset and now it's 6:00pm before I know it and the sun is still hanging around long enough to let me get in my last tasks and still have time to sit and enjoy the greenhouse peacefulness.  The added heat and light increase the thirst of not just the plants, but the farmers as well.  Watering has increased more than twice as long in minutes per day and days per week and I've also noticed my water intake increase.  Distant memories of last summer pop into my head, it seemed as though we watered all day every day then, but in the winter, I found myself at times going a week or two without watering at all.  Earlier in the week, we discussed the increasing amount of bolting.  In many cases, the bolting is a sign that we will have to remove the remaining winter crops from the ground and prepare for the new wave of seedlings being brushed onto the soil.  For some plants, this surge is just what we've been waiting for.  Our pea experiment is prime for action as we've noticed a few of our stray plants starting to flower.  Last time we spoke about peas, I had just finished building my first trellis and we discussed the genetics experiment where we will be attempting to cross a purple podded pea with a sweet, tender green snow pea with the goal of developing a purple tender snow pea similar to the green Oregon Giant snow pea we love, but in order to begin, we need the peas to flower.  Interestingly enough...

Snow Peas, Sugar Peas, Greens and purples and so much more...

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Before I ever decided to leave Manhattan for the farm I wanted to learn "real life skills" as Matt and I called them.  Skills like growing food, building things, getting our hands dirty and having a more balanced understanding of how life worked, things that were always left for other skilled people to handle and things that we viewed as obviously important for any human being to be introduced.  Where does our food come from and how was our house built were never questions that crossed my mind growing up, there were more important things to me at the time.  There were basketball games to win and miles to run, girls to find and basically other experiences that never led me to slow down and ask these simple and seemingly innate questions, instead I had trust.  I started having countless conversations with people about how little we felt we actually knew outside of the city world, a world of dependency and an unwritten trust that someone was taking care of these answers.  It wasn't until I stepped outside of my reality that I realized that there was much more going on behind the scenes.  It's funny to look back and think how much I assumed the world had taken care of over the last few thousand years.  I grew up just assuming that people had already sorted through the tough questions about health, food, medicine and land and it was time to go into outer space, yet once I stepped off this island I realized that as a society we are only just beginning to see the results of our actions.  Time is so relative and with an 80 year average lifespan, there just isn't that much time to develop from the past.  I mean we spend the first third or more of our lives learning how to speak coherently and many of us never quite get there, then we're supposed to play catchup by sorting through the puzzle pieces the past generations left us and figure out solutions to problems we can't even understand why they were problems to begin with.  It's pretty amazing to think how far we come and yet how far we still have to go.  Nevertheless, I say le me take certain matters into my own hands on this journey and let me tell you nothing feels as good as seeing a project through from start to finish.  Whether it's seed to carrot or wood pile to trellis, the opportunity to build something is a validating and invigorating feeling.  This week I was given the task of building a trellis for a plant breeding experiment...