April showers, peas and pods

Everybody always tells you that early peas can be sown outside from mid March right through to June, but we had that ‘gardener’s gut feeling’ this year that kept us from early sowing, even though we’re on the south coast. And a good thing too, given that frosts and floods have kept us busy in the last two weeks of March! Now we are starting to sow successionally, and using varieties which are both earlies and maincrops, but specifically that do well in Sussex, as the first couple of years of pea harvest here have us the unhappy experience of ‘empty pod’ which is apparently a problem with some varieties here.

Because pea plants can cast quite a shadow over smaller vegetables, we’ve adopted the clever idea of Bert’s Pyramids – allowing us to have lots of plants in good sun with their shade being cast into the pyramid’s interior! Making pyramids from cane isn’t particularly difficult, much to our surprise.

Labels: allotment-empty-pod, allotment-peas, allotment-pyramids