When March is wet, seeds will sprout, we bet

Coming from Southern California, 10-week-old Tess was surprised, but not unpleasantly, by our March rain. She also told us that she really likes matching shoes and jackets--Bella's green ones and her own white ones.

The rain has been coaxing all of our recently planted seeds to sprout: second crops of spinach, lettuce, arugula, escarole, bok choi, green onions, and chives, and new crops of fennel, radishes, mint, and two kinds of beets--tri-color and golden beets (which even Rick will eat).

And of course, peas. This year, we went hog-wild with peas. We started with 36 feet of tomato trellises. (The tomatoes will go in after the peas come out.) With 1 vine every 2 inches on both sides of each trellis, that is 432 pea plants and a whole lotta peas. Not content with this, a few later, we put a row of bush-style peas between every pair of trellises, for a total of 180 pea plants and a whole lotta more peas. Still not content, a few weeks after that, we lined the edges of our dahlia boxes with double rows of short vines, for a total of 480 pea plants and a whole lotta more peas. (Actually, we seem to have left about 2 row feet bare... So make that 468 pea plants.) Those
plants are about 3 inches tall now.



Of course, we did not plant just one kind of peas. It's true that, with the exception of a few row feet, they are all shelling peas.
We just love shelling peas. We especially love the French petit pois, which are packed so snugly, shoulder-to-shoulder in their pods. But we also packed a few other varieties of shelling peas that come in earlier than the petit pois.

With our succession plantings, we figure we will have pea shelling parties every 2 weeks during April and May! Of course, we won't be able to eat all of these peas fresh. We'll freeze most of them for next winter. It is easy to freeze peas--just par-boil them and throw them in a freezer box or bag. And they will be wonderful!

There is another reason to fill empty areas of the winter garden with peas. They are nitrogen-fixing plants. That means that, instead of depleting the soil, as most vegetables do, peas actually improve the soil for the tomatoes and other vegetables that will follow them.

Oh, there is one other kind of peas we planted -- sweet peas. Flowers, that is. We put them in a nice new 6-inch tall box that Perry and Aaron planted along our picnic area. We hung a net down the center of the box so that in the spring we will have a wall of delicately scented sweet peas.