Planting Peas

St.Patrick's Day is next week. They say you are supposed to plant peas on President's Day but we are usually lucky to have them in by St. Patrick's Day. But with rain forecasted for the next several days we knew that it would be as much as a week after a good rain before the gardens would dry out enough to get back into them. So we had a marathon garden session for a couple days to get it all done. 

I had already driven the posts so we attached metal hog panels to the posts with wire. We have decided to leave this fence up permanently instead of rebuilding it every year. Instead we are trying to go to a no till method and see how it works for us. The metal cow and hog panels that we use for our gardens we have purchased used at estate and farm sales through the years. When you live in the country you never have enough metal posts and fence panels so we buy them whenever we run across them. 

The panels are attached to the posts with wire twisted around the panels and posts and then twisted with wire cutters.

Once the fence is up then I take a hoe and run down the side to make a trench about 1 1/2 inches deep to plant in.

Then drop pea seeds every 1 1/2 inches all the way down the row and then take your hoe and cover them.

And that is an 84 foot row of peas planted. This is the heirloom variety we purchased from Seed Savers Exchange last year called Champion Of England. We purchased about 50 seeds last year and saved an entire lemonade container of seeds. So we have a good start and hope that it does as well this year. We may plant another row in a couple weeks to come in later. Once the peas are up we hope to put down a heavy straw mulch and wet newspaper weed barrier for the garden season duration. 

For the last two days we have fought wind gusts of 40 miles an hour at times. Blowing down limbs and turning over cages throughout the day. Nothing like trying to plant a garden in a tornado. 

Morning Update

And then it snowed !

Blessings from The Holler

The Canned Quilter