Hi, didn't get to garden last year so I'm trying to get back up to speed. Volunteered to take the Garden Club at my intermediate school. This has caused me to try to learn real gardening. Yesterday, I put up trellis netting and planted two kinds of pea seeds Sugar Ann and Oregon Sugar Pod, and also mesculin mix and spinach. This is actually my third attempt at growing peas and so far my harvest has been miserable.
Has anyone in zone 5a-6 started the veges yet? Any hints about growing sugar snap peas?
I hope I can join the discussions here. There's so much good advice.
Back in business
I bypassed the rototilling. I have only a 10'x12' raised bed. I usually hand till with a garden fork. For the peas, I just mounded up the soil under the trellis and planted. I put a newsprint section down in front and back. Then, I hand dug down about 6 inches for a 1' x 4' section, sifted the top layer of dirt and sowed the spinach and lettuce. I don't have much time so the projects have to be kept small. Today is a was because it's raining and one weekend day gets devoted to my mom and errands.
Much better off not tilling. Damages the soil structure and micro-organisms.
Hi Candy!
I think you are right on with the peas.
I plant mine as soon as the snow is gone from the bed I plant peas in.
I would have planted mine this weekend, but we ended up getting rain instead of sun.
I am shooting for next weekend for lettuces and peas. At least in the dry spots. The nice thing about lettuce is you can put it in numerous small spaces and pull it to make room for warm season veggies when they are ready to come out.
I am going to try a small row cover area on some of my greens this year. I haven't been able to harvest things like chinese cabbage because of flea beetles.
Well, guess I'm good then. I'm planning to plant more seeds in two weeks or so and get a succession going until the weather is too hot. Today it rained and watered in my seeds and wet down my newspaper mulch (held down by stones and to be covered with bark mulch later. Was out running errands with my mom today and saw the Forsythia blooming in some spots, saw Robins, noticed the shrubs are popping buds. Maybe it really is Spring after all. Thank goodness I don't live in the midwest.
I haven't seen any forsythia yet. I think mine just got out from under the snow. ;) Will have to check.
That's great that you are taking the Garden Club at school. What kind of projects are you doing?
DH's family has been planting pea's for over 50 years, he plants in April, as March is to wet here. These are a few rules his family follows......
Plant peas in a sandy, well-drained soil, that warms up quickly in the spring. Plant peas very early in the spring, as soon as the garden soil has thawed or has dried out during a wet springs. If this is a new vegetable garden and you never planted peas or beans in this soil be sure to use nitrogen fixing bacterial inoculant to help the seed extract nitrogen from the air. This bacteria form must be present in the soil for the pea to grow vigorously. This inoculant is readily available at your favorite garden center. Mix the seed with the inoculant and plant. After you have grown peas once, the bacteria will survive in the soil. Peas do not need fertilizer because the plant can gather it from the air if the bacterium is present in the soil. Plant peas 2 inches deep, space the seed 3 inches apart and 18 inches between rows. Peas do not take from the soil; they help build a rich soil
Wow, that's great advice. Of course I didn't use the inoculant. Now, since I do plan to plant more peas, this could be a good experiment. I'll go get some inoculant and see if it makes a difference in performance of the plants.
The soil was definitely workable. I mounded it under the trellis netting. We had over a week with no rain, then it did rain yesterday, but today is blustery but dry.
About the school garden. We have a patch that will be dedicated mostly to vegetables. It's 56' x 21' and today we spread composted horse manure all through it. It will be rototilled. There is a second patch that will be tended by the fourth grade teachers and some of their kids and it will become a three-sisters garden. Finally, there is a patch that was broken last year but not ammended or anything and nothing much grew there, so we're amending it and growing low need stuff and or the frivolous stuff like a sun-flower house, herbs and legumes to till into the ground. I plan to plant cover crops next fall that will get rototilled into the soil next spring in hopes of building some garden soil. These are just grassy areas that the school is allowing us to use and they started out compacted and infertile.
For when your nitrogen is broken.
Candy,
you can do your lettuces in big pots. I grow mesclun and leaf lettuce in 4 16" plastic flower pots. I have to do this because I have an extremely hungry groundhog and if I don't put the pots up on little garden end tables, he gets all the sprouts. I usually put mixes of these in and I have great lettuce crops each summer. You can try this because then you can grow lettuce wherever you want instead of using raised bed space.
Martha
Martha, somewhere I have a pattern for a lettuce box. I've been asking DH to make me lettuce boxes for two years now. My raised bed is fenced with deer netting and this is usually pretty effective. I have twice, not secured it properly and lost my whole tomato crop. I'm pretty conscientious with it now. But, I want lettuce boxes so I can move the stuff around and rotate crops and have lettuce longer (in theory at least) I could even bring the boxes inside at night to keep the critters out of them. I didn't think about pots.
My pots are kind of heavy, but I could move them if I had a deer problem, which, knock on wood, I shouldn't have.Also, currently, I have my son to do any heavy lugging that needs to be done. They would all fit on top of an old picnic table I use for a potting table, if the need arose.
I do have a groundhog problem, however. Why the coyotes and the foxes that patrol our neighborhoods don't eat the nice fat groundhog, I can't begin to tell you, but that's the way it is.
I loosen the soil in each pot down about 6-9 inches and add a little bit of new soil on top. then I sow the seed directly in the pots. It has given me some fine greens over the last few years. If it ever stops raining long enough, I will go out and do it soon.
Martha
Yes...sorry I meant to get back here but our neighbor passed away so I haven't had time to get back on and explain.
Yes, the inoculant helps the plant take nitrogen from the air and ends up adding it to the soil.
Candy:
I'm in zone 5b too. I can tell you, I heard all the advice about how peas and lettuces were cold weather crops, so plant them early (like March). I did that last year and nothing came up until more like June anyway! So I'm just planting them late April this year....might just be me, but that worked and I had some nice peas and greens that I started just a little before the warm weather stuff (maybe by 4 weeks or so).
M.
Hi M. Well, I planted two weeks ago and the peas are sprouting. The mesculin mix too. The spinach is no where to be seen. I suspect that the later the peas are planted, the faster they'll sprout and grow. Don't know either. I'm a novice with no local mentor to ask. So far, I've gotten a sparse crop of peas each year. One year just before it got too hot and the vines died. I'm now taking notes and if I'm still here in 10 years, maybe I'll know how to grow peas (lol).