Braiding Sweetgrass and Sugar Snaps in the Garden

This morning I spent some time with the sugar snap pea plants in my garden. I'd never really looked closely at them before, just greedily snatched off the pea pods when they were ready, wondering when the next one would be ripe. This morning's study stemmed from the observation that the top-heavy pea plants, now that they had finally started to produce flowers, had also outgrown their trellis, and folded over. At first I worried that the folded over part would dry up and the baby peas would die. But it's now three days post-fold-over event, and the plants still appear green and healthy. Looking for the tiny pea pods among the greenery, I wondered what the pea plant's process for producing flowers, and hence pea pods is. Today each plant has just a few flowers, near the top of the plant. Each flower emerges from a spot on the stem that produces a set of leaves. Will each little set of leaves produce a flower, starting from the top? Some sets of leaves produce two flowers. I took my eyes on a little walk up from the bottom of each pea plant, making my way up the plant leaf pair by leaf pair, up a tiny ladder. The leaf pairs at the very bottom are just two leaves. Moving to the next step, this leaf pair has sent out a tiny tendril, which branches out with its own tendril pairs. Will these turn into leaves? At the top of the trellis, the tendrils find only each other onto which to entwine. These tendrils coil into themselves, sometimes drying up. Is this the signal to the rest of the plant to produce a flower, when the plant can't safely grow any taller? And will flowers start to make their way back down the plants, climbing back down the ladder, from leaf pair to leaf pair, adding a pea pod for each one? What other purpose would there have been for producing so many branches if not to produce more pods? 

The pea pods are still tiny, but one looks big enough for a first snack. Snapping it off, I hope I am communicating to the pea crop that it's time to produce more peas - disseminators are ready and waiting. Fresh as the morning, the pea pod breaks between my teeth, and I wait for tomorrow's harvest.