Pea Planting Time!

It's time to plant peas!  Or, if you already planted peas, like I did earlier this year, it's time to watch them bloom and start to thrive, after weeks of being little scrawny things!

Though it may be hard to believe after yesterday's rain with snow at higher elevations, Spring is on its way to the Bay Area and it's time to plant things that don't mind a little cold to germinate.

Growing in my garden right now are peas, cilantro, and dill.  I have a few beets struggling along, but it's not quite warm enough for them yet.  They'll hang on like troopers and start to actually grow sometime in mid-March.

If you're like me, you may have had trouble getting your peas to actually use their supports to climb on.  I didn't trellis them when they were little and now that they're spreading all over the ground, I realized I had to get them tied up so they could grab onto their supports.  Otherwise they'll get to a certain height and fall over, bending or even breaking their stem, which is just heartbreaking to see.

As you can see here, I have a bent stem on one of the peas already
but have tied it up to a support and hope to save it.  The stem is not
torn, it is only slightly bent.

I should be able to wrap text around this image but Blogger is not letting me for some reason.  Oh well, I apologize for the formatting.  The first picture worked fine.  

My winter garden also has garlic that I planted in the fall, around October I believe, in a half wine barrel.  I am forever "losing" garlic, because I forget where I planted it and when the grass comes up and becomes thick, I can't see it and end up chopping it down when I weed whack around the garden.  So this time I figured I'd put it where I can't lose it!  Also, the garlic won't be ready to pull until June.  I can put a zucchini into that half barrel in June and not lose any of my growing season, whereas if I put the garlic in the ground (and labelled it) in one of my raised beds, it would block my planting of peppers or tomatoes in those spaces in April or early May.  

The other items in my winter garden are failed spinach (New Zealand Giant, which withstands heat and apparently also requires it for successful growth, despite the package label), thriving carrots (Macarena, a North African variety from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds) and of course cilantro and dill.  I don't have a picture of the dill, it is still tiny.   The cilantro and carrots are here; the carrots are in the big blue pot.  A second pot of carrots of a different kind sprouted but failed to thrive.  The seeds were older, and that may have been the difficulty.

      

Happy gardening! Plant your peas now and you'll have lots of wonderful peas before it gets too hot in late May or early June.