Pea Progress

Growing peas has been a bit of a challenge for me over the last five years with a battle against the mice who I now know are the reason my seeds don’t germinate.

I started off just planting my seeds in the ground in late spring as my father in law does (and he gets great peas every year) and nothing happened. Literally no sign of a single pea germinating!

Slightly puzzled by my previous years efforts I thought I would go a step further and I moved onto placing my seeds in a bag of damp compost for 2 weeks before planting in the ground and still nothing.

Not one to be easily defeated I next moved onto the suggestion of planting my seeds in an old piece of guttering in the greenhouse (so you can just dig a trench and slide them one in one go for planting). This was slightly more successful and I did get a few shoots which I planted out at the start of summer much to the joy of the two resident pigeons that seem to reside in my garden. Again not a single pea!

So this year I meant business, I brought lots of pea seeds, soaked half over night in water and the second half I planted in modules in the greenhouse. These were dug up and eaten (by mice, not me!), so I went again and covered my trays with netting. Can you believe how determined the little mice are as they actually bit through my netting to get at the seeds and dug them up again.

Now my patience was really wearing thin, but I’ve always been determined (my hubby would say stubborn!) so my last attempt was sown in trays in the greenhouse with propagator lids weighed down by bricks.

All this determination and patience has finally paid off and I was rewarded with an abundance of pea plants most of which survived when planted out. Strangely the germination seemed to be exactly the same for both the soaked and unsoaked seeds although the peas planted at home have done much better than those planted in the farm patch. I can only assume this has been due to the recent dry spell and the heavy clay soil I have at home retaining more moisture.

So with the peas planted out and given some chicken wire to climb up they grew quite happily. It seems my resident pigeons in the garden may have moved on as those at home didn’t even need netting and pods started to grow.

Being the impatient person I am and inspired by all the Instagram pictures of people eating peas straight from the plant, I gave in and picked some pods containing little peas and ate them before even managing to take a picture!! (now I get what it’s all about and it has taken some will power to actually get peas into the kitchen).

Having munched on them for dinner and as snacks recently I’ll definitely be growing them again although I can’t help but think a lot of effort goes into growing these little treats.

I now have a new appreciation for Mr Birds Eye!!