Pea Prep

Yesterday I spent the whole day with the windows open saying to myself "What a wonderful day it is today!" and then today I have spent back in my sweaters with socks and house shoes cursing the wind and rain and cold.  There has been a lot of hot tea today, and much more dreaming about spring planting.

We are really moving along with all of our seedlings that we have already started.  This weekend I will be seeding a few summer cabbages, broccoli and cauliflower.  But tomorrow I am going to put out a few of our pea seeds.  Peas are really easy to grow.  They are super fast, plant early and die back rather quickly.  Because of this though, it is best to plant peas every few weeks so you always have a batch preparing for harvest.  We only planted one round last year and I was really sorry because the ones we were able to harvest were great.  This year though, we've moved them to the front yard to act like a trellis in the back of the new beds I have been imagining.

But before I put them in our vegetable planters, I thought I'd share a quick tip I picked up last year.

First, these are the peas I am planting.  There are more of the same coming next week(ish), so I thought I would go ahead and get these started.

These are "Green Arrow" peas.  They are an heirloom variety and I bought them along with several other heirloom seeds from ZZiggysGal Etsy shop last year.  I bought the variety pack so I could try out a few different things other than what I had purchased from Seed Savers.  This year I bought a larger batch from Seed Savers only.  Anyway, notice how shriveled and dry they are?  Technically, if you water them enough, they will sprout anyway, but I do not like to chance things when my 750 lb goal could be in jeopardy.  So I did this:

I took a ziplock bag (one that I had used, washed, and reused), filled it with about a half an inch of water, and tossed a few seeds inside.

And by the next morning they were plump as, well, peas.  I put a few in our indoor seed boxes (where other seeds hadn't sprouted) and tomorrow I will put a few outside to begin our garden perimeter.

Just a quick step to jump start seeds and an easy way to weed out any dead ones before you put them in the ground.  And instant gratification for those of you, who like me, can't wait to see stuff growing already.