(Rhythmic background singers quietly rapping Pease Porridge hot/ Pease Porridge cold/ Pease Porridge in a pot/ Nine days old) (Repeat until end of song.)
I love you Leo Dried Peas for being in a beautiful box and no one thinking to redesign you for decades…
I love you Leo Dried Peas for making it easy to misread “Steeping Tablet*” for “Sleeping Tablet” and having a lion there, who feels incongruous with the humble pea except in reference to the name “Leo.”
I love you Leo Dried Peas for making mushy peas and pea soup and pea hummus.**
I love you Leo Dried Peas to plant on the kitchen window sill and have pea shoots for salads and stir fries in the winter (see photo below)
I love you Leo Dried Peas for letting me cultivate you a little bigger to have large leaves to cook as greens
I love you Leo Dried Peas for growing for us, in our garden, finally, in the middle of September, after a series of abandoned experiments, three Proper Pea Pods, each with two fresh peas.
I love you Leo Dried Peas, love you love you love you Leo Dried Peas, a love that if it dies will regenerate as is the nature of the cycle of a plant from seed to plant to pod to seed…
I love you Leo Dried Peas for being 65pence for 250 grams of said seed, really, and available at my local greengrocers as well as at the Co-op.
And I love you Leo Dried Peas, I guess you could even be a leguminous nitrogen-fixing green-manure to help improve the situation in my raised beds–***
Leo Dried Peas, if you please….
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*a bicarbonate of soda tablet to soften the pea-walls during soaking
**pureed, lemony, garlicky and add dillweed if possible
***comments from experienced gardeners welcome
Sprouting the peas: a great nibble for a passer-by, and soon to grow into a proper pea-shoot.
Kitchen Counter Culture 