This Is How We Plant the Peas

I've done a lot of gardening this past week, but haven't had time to document it, so get ready for some major catch up posts!



First,  peas.  I  love peas. They may be my very favorite veggie to grow, and were the inspiration for my blog name. When I started my garden five years ago I grew sugar snaps, but since then my family and I have come to realize that we love snow peas best of all. They're sweet and crunchy like sugar snaps, and are great fresh in salads or on a veggie tray, or cooked in stir fries. In my opinion sugar snaps are almost *too* sweet. Snow peas are just right. Plus, they're perfect for my super cool pea growing method. 

Peas are vining plants, and sugar snaps and shelling peas grow tall vines, 5-8 feet long. So they definitely need a trellis. I like to use my raised beds for growing peas. If a trellis is required, it means that I can only grow peas on the north side of my raised beds, like so.

Peas planted on the north side of the bed, other stuff planted everywhere else.

 
This limits the amount of peas I can grow. I like to fill up the *entire* bed with peas. Snow peas are shorter than other varieties. Their vines generally only grow 30 inches to four feet tall. So instead of dealing with trellises and restricting my peas to the very north edge of my beds, I fill the entire bed up with peas and let them go crazy. They do end up looking slightly out of control by the time they're mature and producing like gangbusters, but they're still manageable and basically use each other as trellises and stay contained within the bed.  This isn't my picture, but they end up looking something like this:

 A little messy and slightly harder to harvest, but a pea bonanza (and I'm totally jealous of the 4/28 harvest date this person has!)

I make it my goal to plant my peas about a month before the last frost date, which around here is May 25th this year (the last full moon in May).  I planted my peas on April 27th, but if you haven't gotten your peas in yet it's not too late! Early to mid May in Zone 5 is perfectly fine. So here's my planting method:

1) Add compost to the beds, and mix it in with the rest of the soil. My beds are 4'x4'. When I first set them up they were filled with 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 compost, per the Square Foot Gardening method. This is my fifth year gardening in these beds. Each year I top them off with more compost or organic potting soil, so they're heavier on the compost now.

2) Use a yardstick to create temporary grids in the beds, creating 16 individual square foot areas. I have nails in foot increments along the side of my beds that I use as guides for creating the yardstick lines.

If you look *really* hard you can sort of see the  guideline nails in the wood framing the bed.

 3) Check to see how many peas should be planted per square foot. Looks like 8. I knew that! Really I did.

 

 4) Use a pencil or your finger to poke 8 two inch deep holes in each square.

 5) Find a helper to plant those seeds! Put one or two in each hole.

Go Sam Joe!

 6) Water every couple days, and get ready for a pea fiesta in just under two months!

A couple more notes on peas.  A lot of gardeners use inoculant when doing their pea planting. The way I understand it, peas have a symbiotic relationship with a special kind of bacteria found in soil, and need it to produce well. To make sure the bacteria is present, you can dip your peas in water then roll them around in purchased pea bacteria (kinda weird, I know), called inoculant. I wasn't aware of the whole inoculant thing when I started my garden, so didn't use it, and my peas flourished anyway. The Square Foot Gardening method has you fill your beds with compost from multiple sources when you first set up your garden (ie not just cow manure compost). I'm guessing that helps ensure the right kind of bacteria is in there *somewhere*.

After reading several gardening books and blogs this spring I decided to bite the bullet and actually bought some inoculant this year, but in the end I decided not to use it. It *is* good insurance if you're planting peas in bed or an area of your yard for the first time (which I'm not). It's only $5 for a bag that will inoculate 100 *pounds* of pea seed!

Say what?! Why must they make these things so complicated?

I've also heard a lot of gardeners saying they soak their peas before planting. This helps the seeds soften up and sprout earlier. I've never done that either. Without soaking, seedlings emerge in 7-14 days.  I keep things as simple as possible: no trellis, no inoculant, no soaking. It's worked for me so far! *knock on particle board*

Coming up - Ninja, the seedlings, and more garden updates.