Since I was a kid I’ve loved eating peas ‘out of the pod’. Just seeing them brings up lovely memories. Like the time I bought a bagful from a stall at the market in L’Aquila and took them back to the house in Fossa. Sitting shelling them (and eating most) and watching village life amble by.
Nanna Francesca’s colossal bowls brimming with peas in leftover tomato sauce, passata, ‘the gravy’ as she called it, that she served with her home-made meatballs, polpette, more egg-shaped than round.
One evening when I was in Calabria, seeing in a Castrovillari lane an elderly couple chatting while sitting on their front step shelling peas together. Sensing the lovely camaraderie between them borne of a long time together.
And, of course, Nonno Anni’s pea patch in his backyard at New Farm in the 1970s. Come winter, it was a forest to me as a child when I’d work my way up and down the rows, swiftly learning to open the pods single-handedly as I crammed peas into my mouth. How kind Nonno Anni and Nanna Francesca were that they didn’t mind a kid decimating their crop at times!
Although over the years, this pea patch was replaced by snake beans, chicory then a stack of bricks, I recall again now how years later, when I was an adult, Nonno Anni planted peas there again. ‘Remember how you were always in the pea patch when you were little?’ he said to me, eyes crinkling in a smile with a bit of a tear. ‘I planted these for you.’ It still makes my heart swell to think of it.
I’ve been buying peas from the market every week while they’ve been in season the past few months and this is the last basket now for the year. I’m sad to see them go but they wouldn’t seem as special if I could buy them all year round anyway. So I’ll savour these (not sure any will make it into the pot!) and look forward to more peas come next winter. 😊💚
The shortest day of the year and the garden’s winter light seems crisper, a dryness to the cool air. As I get older, I realise more and more my gardening is taking on aspects of the Nonnos and Nonnas among us, as if by osmosis… checking each day, touching the plant leaves, saving seeds, happiness at seeing healthy worms in the freshly turned over soil. Perhaps one day I’ll even start planting by the moon like many Italian gardeners do, instead of plonking plants in and hoping for the best.
Our two birdbaths and various ground dishes about the place are being visited and almost emptied every day by both day and night visitors to the garden. 😊🐦🐝🐞🐾
Doing things like an Italian you’d never have thought you would when growing up… 
Zoë Boccabella 