You may have noticed in my post on broad beans that there were
randomly four pea seedlings in my tray of beans. I mentioned it enough so
you should have done, but I did not explain why. I think I had sowed
fifteen broad beans across two trays containing a mixture of sweet peas and
beans and had six spots left so just bunged in some peas to make use of the
space. Obviously only four came up, but then I sowed another tray of peas
to make up the numbers, and like the broad beans virtually every one came up which
was good. The trick I think to getting a good germination result is to
pay attention to the sow by date on the packet. I am the type of person
who will happily eat something past its use by date, I fully believe that if
tastes and smells all right your good to go. I will even go so far as to
scrape mould off things like jam to eat the stuff below. A little mould
never hurt anyone. Anyway I digress, turns out the same attitude can not
be applied to pea and beans as last year I sowed a whole bunch and got one
lonely, miserable and lets face it, pointless broad bean. Nobody’s going
to get fat on that. They were out of date, not by much but apparently
they are a little pedantic and if the packet says 2012 then there is no playing
ball in 2013. Seeing as they were sown in exactly the same way I can only
think of this as being the reason.
I have obviously got very blasé about seeds coming up as other
than those in my broad bean post I forgot to take any pictures. Although
god knows why because my seed production has been a complete disaster this
year, more on that to follow! The packet of peas came again from Chelsea
and for some unknown reason I plumped for a variety of marrowfat peas rather
than just the usual garden peas. Having just done some internet research
it says these are left to dry naturally in the field and are used to make mushy
peas, which I did already know. That wasn’t really my plan for these I
have to admit. I was planning on letting them fatten and ripen and then
whip them off and it them solid. I presume this is possible, I guess I
will find out in due course! The variety is Onward, which seems a strange
thing to call a pea considering it doesn’t go on to anywhere, it tends to stay
put in the ground where you planted it. Obviously I don’t know how it
tastes yet but I can confirm it’s a good germinator.
As I didn’t photograph them until I had them in the ground here is
a little snapshot of my pea patch with my peas freshly in. This would
probably have been around late April early May time, it certainly doesn’t look
as neat and orderly now.
No comments:
Post a Comment