‘Planting peas can be a challenge,’ says Gayton gardener Jamie Marsh.
Here’s the latest instalment of Jamie Marsh’s ‘Jamie’s Little Allotment’ column…
There’s nothing quite like having a day on the allotment, weeding, planting out, and sowing more seeds.
As the day goes on and you start to get a bit peckish, you start to have a little look around at what you might be able to nibble on. Pulling a radish or a carrot out of the ground, giving it a good rinse off in the water butt, and crunching into that freshly grown produce is just amazing, in most instances a completely different taste to what you get from the supermarket.
So many different fruits and veggies don’t even get a chance to leave the plot.
My absolute favourite would be a fresh sweetcorn cob but they won’t be ready for a while yet. Another contender for the best plot snack is peas.
If you haven’t tried fresh peas straight from the vine, you are missing out. Pull the pod from the plant, then slide your thumb down the pod to reveal those amazing little green spheres of sweetness. Just delicious, except, this year it just isn’t happening for me.
A few months ago I sowed my mange tout, sugar snap and normal peas in trays in the greenhouse. So easy to grow, just sprinkle a few of each variety you want to grow on a layer of compost, then cover with more compost, give them a good watering then wait. In seven to 14 days you will see the shoots appear.
Talking about shoots, another great thing you can do with peas is exactly the same as I just explained above, but instead of using seeds you have brought to grow to full size plants, buy some dried peas from the supermarket and sow them as I mentioned before, but a lot thicker this time. Again cover over and water them then let them grow somewhere warm with lots of sunlight, keep the compost moist, and in a few weeks you will have a small forest of pea shoots which you can snip off and add to salads. You will get two or three harvests of shoots from one sowing.
Anyway, I digress, where was I? So after the shoots have appeared, I’ll let them get a few inches high then prick them out and pot them up. Once the weather has warmed up, and I decide where they are going, they can go out .
I normally just go to our local woods and gather up lots of sticks and pile them up over the plants for the peas to clamber over, but this year I wanted them to climb up bamboo teepees, much like the runner beans.
After pushing five seven foot canes in the ground in a circle, bring the tops together and tie them all up with some garden twine. Once the teepee is tied, I ran round and round the bottom a few times, tying to each cane to make something for the pea tendrils to cling on to, then just planted up the pea plants, one to the bottom of each cane.
It was only a day or two after, that I noticed they were looking very sad. Upon close inspection I noticed they had been nibbled. Slugs were my first thought. I knew they probably wouldn’t have come to anything so I pulled them out and replaced them with some garden centre-bought pea plant plugs, and also sprinkled a ring of slug barrier around the new plant, thinking these would be fine.
To my horror, three days passed and the peas were in the same state, but this time as I walked from one teepee to another, I spotted a wood pigeon very brazenly eating the beautiful tender little pea shoots right in front of my eyes.
Okay, now we know what it was let’s give it one more go, so I bought some more pea plugs, and for a second time I re-planted them but this time I used some more bamboo canes but smaller one. I then pushed them in the compost six inches away from the original ones then made a pigeon barrier with twine around the canes. Hopefully, this will keep them safe, I will keep you updated.
If you want to tell me about any of your garden stories or would like to ask me a question please email me at
jamieslittleallotment@gmail.com
