As both a farmer and backyard gardener, I've grown a lot of green shell peas. In fact, I have quite a reputation for picking more weight of peas per hour than anyone else on the crew. And I pick a row pretty clean. If the pea pod is ready for the plucking, its destiny is fixed.

Which is why I found snow peas so frustrating.

Snow peas are those long flat edible pea pods you see in Chinese food, and more often now in salads. They grow on vines which look just like regular pea vines. But, grrrr, are they tough to pick. Not that they pull off hard. It's just that I couldn't SEE the suckers.

I would go busily down 50 feet of row, scanning the tapestry of vine and fruit before me, and pick every last flat snow pea I could find. I would get to the end of that stretch, look back, and see literally hundreds of prime, perfect pods hanging out there untouched behind me.

Clearly they had been right in front of me. They hadn't grown perfect in the five or 10 minutes since my fingers had probed their premises. I just didn't see them the first time through. They were invisible to my traditional green-shell-pea-thinking eye.

I realized that if I were going to get good at picking snow peas, I would have to retrain, adjust my thought processes about what a pea should look like. If not, I would keep on missing what was right in front of me.

My snow pea experience comes back to me every time I'm confronted with a situation I think is obvious, but which other people are blind to. This whole debate about government orphanages is a prime example.

A talk show the other day was ridiculing the statistic which says it costs $36,000 a year to raise a kid in an orphanage.

''Ridiculous,'' the co-hosts were saying. Since government figures are always bloated, they said, let's cut that figure about in half. Even then, it doesn't make sense. Every reasonable parent knows it doesn't cost $18,000 a year to raise one kid in this country. Just look at the average family income, they said. You are your own evidence.

Therefore, they concluded, the figures for the cost of orphanages are full of baloney.

Therefore, I have concluded, they are not seeing the snow peas.

What is obvious here that they are not seeing? The simple fact that in a government orphanage, every worker is paid –theoretically a living wage – to tend those youngsters, in three shifts, covering the situation 24 hours a day.

At home, the labor is free. The only way parents can afford to bring up children as cheaply as they do is by donating their time, free of charge – to the kid, to the community, and to the government.

I was startled to realize, listening to that talk show, that people in the real world (talk shows are real, aren't they?) don't see what to me is so obvious. But then, having made my living as a farmer, I appreciate (boy, do I appreciate!) the difference between unpaid family labor and a cash outlay for payroll to do the same job.

Yet I know this oblivion to the value of unpaid home labor is common. In fact, it is the motivating force behind the recent push by some organizations to have that labor – both field and home labor, usually done by women – counted as part of the Gross Domestic Product.

Take backyard gardens. The Maine Department of Agriculture estimates that the value of the produce grown in backyard gardens surpasses the value of all the state's commercial crops combined. Hardly insignificant.

(When Bob Packwood, shortly before his political demise, stated that we couldn't afford $40 billion to provide child care to welfare mothers, he inadvertently put a governmentally-generated figure on the value of some of that unpaid labor.)

Only if the paid replacement value of ''volunteer'' work is measured will we get a real handle on how much work actually gets done in this country. And only then will such absurd arguments about the real costs of raising children disappear from the airwaves.

The irony goes further, of course. Newt Gingrich plans to have these orphanages set up for the kids of teenage moms and others who cannot afford to raise their children. It's supposed to cut welfare costs.

Yet, if we paid the mothers what it would cost to institutionalize those children, the problem would literally disappear. Most women I know can comfortably raise a child, 24 hours a day, on $36,000 a year after taxes. Or even $18,000. Room, meals, clothes, chauffeur service, minor medical care, vacations, the works.

Maybe, to save costs, we can pay the mothers two-thirds of that to take care of their own kids 16 hours a day (evenings and nights), and pay someone else to look after them for the other eight (teachers?) while mothers are off at a second, ''real'' job. That would look great on the books – former welfare recipients now working 24 hours a day.

The concept makes welfare look like a real bargain. Which, once you've trained your eyes and can see what's hanging out there in front of you, it is.