A public service announcement

Never, never, never, under any circumstances whatsoever, buy Amish Snap peas.

You know how hull peas are supposed to make a satisfying pop! when you squeeze their fat bottoms with your thumb? Well, there is no pop to be found anywhere in these peas. In fact, the only thing that happens when you give them the butt squeeze is that the butt tears off. The best way to get the peas out, I’ve learned, is to tear off the heads of the pods and string them, working from their heads down their curving backsides. Then, oh wretched Extra Steps, you flip the pods around in your hand and pinch their butts. This method might work if you could string them the whole way to the end, but more often than not the strings disappear halfway down the pods so that you still have to use both thumbs to carefully split open the pods. And the pods still shred and rip.

And you know how you’re supposed to scrape the peas out of their pods with one deft swipe of your thumb? There is nothing deft about scraping these peas out. On the rare occasion that you open a pod and keep it intact, the little peas cling fiercely to their umbilical cords so that it often takes two fingers, plus lots of valuable time, to wrestle them out. More often than not, you end up picking each pea, some of them smooshed, out of bits of mutilated pod.

The Amish Snap peas also cause marital strife, something that the writers of the Seed Saver Catalog failed to mention. I’m pulling the still-producing, worthless things out by their roots today.

These peas are bewitched, I tell you. Beware.

Love,
A Pissed-Off Home Gardener