snow peas

Our First Snow Sugar Peas

~ McArtor ~ 1 Comment
snowpeas
snow sugar pea - delicious, sweet, crispy and a little juicy

The best reward of gardening is to see our six-year-old son look for vegetables to eat in our garden plot.  My son will not hesitate to taste anything grown in our garden.   He likes most of our spring crops this year.  He munches on leaves of Romaine and Oakleaf lettuce while we dig, weed and plant. The snow sugar peas are his favorite.  It’s remarkable that he stopped whacking sticks in the dirt to examine the snow sugar pea plant with me.  I showed him how the snow pea plant’s tendrils twist, grab and help the plant climb up the trellis.   Together, we found the first plump snow pea pods ready to be picked (plump pea pod to be picked – that is a tongue twister !).  Now, independently, he will pick one dangling pod, spray it with water from the hose and crunch it in his mouth.  Once, after he bit a pod, I heard him say, “mmmmm, they are sweet, too.”

We will plant snow sugar peas again next spring!

Our First Snow Peas

~ McArtor ~ 1 Comment

Snow peas

We finally have sturdy snow pea seedlings growing under row covers! Only a few seedlings emerged from the first snow pea seeds we planted in early April. Unfortunately, those fragile plants were nibbled down to the dirt by some critters. To improve seedling growth we treated the next batch of snow pea seeds with inoculant before planting and to prevent seedling damage we covered the ground with row covers. We now have thriving snow pea plants with dangling tendrils searching for something to climb. The plants need to grow bigger before the tendrils can wrap around the reinforcing wire trellis we installed two years ago. This is our first year planting snow peas. We learned another gardening lesson through trial and error.

What is inoculant? A commercially prepared source of dormant rhizobia, a naturally occurring soil bacterium. These tiny bacteria live within the bean roots and extract nitrogen from the air (which is 78% nitrogen), thus feeding the plants. Inoculant can be dusted onto moistened bean and pea seed just before planting. It’s a fully natural, simple process which takes only a moment, but will increase crop yields all season long. Inoculant can be purchased at most garden centers.