Cheating Spring: Growing Pea Shoots Indoors

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Even though the promise of spring is only a few weeks away, my vegetable garden is still a threadbare blanket of winter’s despair.

OK – that’s a little dramatic, but month after month of cold, dark days can really bring on a case of Spring Fever in a person. The remedy? Planting a pot of pea shoots or micro salad greens indoors, to savor spring a little earlier than Mother Nature intended.

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Kitchen Garden Tour

With locally sourced food all the rage these days, I thought I’d keep on trend and share some highlights from my backyard vegetable garden. Forty feet from “farm” to table is about as local as it gets. I will warn you, however, that my gardening methods are far from orthodox, and that true gardeners might find some of my admissions scandalous.

For example, I often forego a fall cleanup and leave dead plants in the ground all winter. This is not good garden hygiene! I also let cilantro and dill go to seed every summer, thereby delegating the sowing of next year’s crop to the wind. Rather than double-digging the beds, I let the worms do most of the soil preparation. I don’t even pinch the extra growth off my tomato plants, even though doing so would theoretically improve the fruit quality. The encouraging news is that despite my laissez-faire approach, things still grow! Mother Nature is one of those control-freak moms who gets her way no matter what.

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