By all accounts, I am a major disappointment as a vegetable grower. The one plant that gives me a bit of veggie confidence is the simple pea. I add sugar or snap peas to the garden every year and every year they grow and produce loads of peas. Then, almost nothing else that I plant grows much or produces any food. But at least the peas grew.

It should be noted, however, that we don’t eat many of the peas ourselves. Over the last fourteen years we’ve had a pea-obsessed llasa apso dog named Mona Lisa. Every weekday in the summer, as I’m coming home from work, I grab a few ripe peas off the vines and when I get in the door I pass them to Mona and Bodhi who devour them with relish.

I’ll keep growing peas every year so I have something successful in the veggie garden. There are new types coming along every year. I grew a short one last year and they were ridiculous–about six inches tall with only a few peas on each plant. It would have been easy to miss them altogether!