Why I'm Rooting for the Peas

Plus: A no-recipe recipe for grilled cheese with radish sprouts

Welcome back to all of you who have been with Tiny Seeds since the very beginning (Friday), and welcome to those who signed up in recent days. I was going to wait until Friday for another update, but so much has been sprouting up in the garden, I didn’t want to get behind there or here, so let’s get to it. (I promise: Never more than one email a week.)

But first! I’m so happy you’re along for this ride with us. Know anyone else who might be? Please click the green Share button to send Tiny Seeds to your friends and family.

How to thin radishes

I mentioned last time that I’d be thinning our seedlings according to the info on the back of the seed packets. The timeline for that is anywhere from 7 to 14 days after planting for most of what’s in our fall harvest. Seedlings are ready for thinning when they’re about 2 to 4 inches tall and have at least one set of leaves.

In our garden, our three rows of radishes hit those milestones first, so Jagger and I set out to thin them this weekend. Thinning seedlings isn’t awful work — it’s basically like pulling weeds, except the weeds are your excess plantings — but it’s definitely not toddler work. At least not our toddler, who ripped out a handful or two of would-be radishes before deciding he was over it. I set him up with the garden hose to give our seedlings a pre-thinning soak instead — and you can see in this video that it ended with more than the veggies getting wet.

Here’s a row of radish seedlings before and after thinning (they’re supposed to be every 2 inches apart; I will go through them once more in the next day or two):

Grilled cheese with sprouts

Just tossing all those freshly pulled sprouts into the soil seemed even more wasteful than the obvious over-seeding I’d done, so I collected as many as I could of our homegrown radish microgreens (pic below). They tasted bright and clean like a radish, but without the peppery bite.

After a quick rinse and pat-dry, I layered a handful of them between slices of mozzarella and cheddar cheeses. We had kaiser buns, which are pretty bready and tall for a traditional grilled cheese. I filled our teapot with water and used the weight of it to press down the sandwich as it cooked in a cast-iron skillet with a little salted butter. One flip and another press later, and it was ready to be cut into quarters for Jagger’s lunch. He loved it. I didn’t make a lot of fanfare over the connection between what he was eating and the gardening we had just done, because he’s not in a big “eating green vegetables” phase right now. But I hope that as this project progresses, he’ll be more eager to taste what we’re growing.

Rooting for the peas

Sometimes on Twitter you’ll see home cooks posting about the position of their favorite stovetop burners (team front-left, for the record). And I imagine every home gardener develops, like I have, a crop they have a particular appreciation for, the one they’re hoping will succeed more than any of the others.

Jason @mrmess

Which is your favorite stove top burner? Mine is back left.

For me, it’s the peas. The strike peas we planted are coming up so strongly now: proud little upright soldiers, my cleanest lines of planting thanks to the relative bigness of peas (easier to plant one by one) compared to the rest of our tiny seeds. They’re the first place my eyes go when I check on the garden each day, and the corner I water with the most TLC.

I spent some time this weekend thinking about why I want the peas to do so well. And I came to this: Everything else in the garden — radishes, lettuces, carrots, beets — are vegetables we buy regularly at the supermarket. So while I’m super excited to be growing our own of those, and some pretty cool heirloom varieties at that, the peas just give me unfathomable amounts of hope, optimism and wonder. How tall will they grow? What will we do with all of them? Will Jagger eat his first peas since having them pureed as a baby? I can’t wait to find out.

See you next time.