How's everyones garden coming?

[Rocky Raab]

Purple hull peas...

Boy, does THAT bring back memories!

When I was stationed in Columbus, Mississippi, an old black man used to come thorugh our neighborhood twice a week on an even older wooden wagon pulled by a mule. He maintained a huge truck garden all by himself and sold produce from that wagon.

Well, he sold us a peck of purple hull peas once. My wife (Chicago born and bred) had never heard of them, and assumed they were like regular English peas. We hulled them - and got purple hands - and then she dropped them into boiling water for three minutes. They were like eating warm gravel.

When she told the story to her Southern girlfriends, thay all about howled themselves to death laughing.

"Honey," they said, "Ya'll have to bawl them peas with a little fatback fer jist ARS afore they're done!"

(translation: BOIL them for HOURS)