Time to move the peas outside and into the garden soil.
I’ve been monitoring the pea seedlings in their little egg carton pots. The egg cartons are working OK – I like that I can put them in the sink and they wick the water up into the soil fairly quickly. The draw back that I’m discovering, though, is that after several days of watering, the egg cartons are very flimsy when wet! Remember when I planted them? See that post here.
This is my vegetable gardening area. I have a BAD infestation of rabbits in my yard, so we created this bunny-free zone several years ago after they’d polished off yet another round of bean sprouts. The fence is only 3 feet tall, but the hardware cloth/wire fencing is anchored an additional 6” below soil level so they can’t dig under the fence either.
I covered the garden with a thick layer of leaves last fall which helps to preserve soil moisture over the winter. The wind has removed some of them already. Inside the raised bed, my strawberry plants are peeking though. Poking up through the bricks are weeds. Ugh.
I raked off the remaining leaves and threw them on the compost pile to finish decomposing. Now I’m going to turn in a couple of small bags of compost. I know I should get a soil test before I just throw some compost in there, but I also know that this garden has been low in nitrogen for the several tests, so I feel pretty confident with adding compost.
Look! Worms! There’s lots of worms in the garden, which makes me feel less like a failure when I look at the weeds.
Finally, I’m ready to actually put the pea seedlings in the soil. I ripped the egg carton apart into individual cups. I found out this is easy to do when the carton is wet, but when it’s dry it doesn’t rip or cut worth a darn. Then I put the seedlings with the cups right in the soil and tucked them in gently.
Final step, I have some PVC-and-string trellises ready for them to grow up. I intentionally put the snap peas opposite the shelling peas. If I let them grow next to each other, they get all tangled up and I can’t figure out how to harvest them. I think I’ll sow some lettuce and spinach seeds in between the peas. Grow peas, grow!
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