A brown bag of peas

In between the cold rain and doing the things that I really should be doing, I managed to do some gardening. The lilac and blossom is smelling wonderful. I am still planting up the extended kitchen garden. On my plan are two rows of peas. Today I went to my box of seeds and discovered I had a grand total of 11 peas. Now the rows on my plan are 12 feet long. With two rows that’s 24 feet of room for the peas.  I think allowing over two feet between each pea plant is going to be excessive.

I thought of driving 20 minutes to the nearest garden centre. Then I remembered that the farm shop I bought the bean poles from, also stocks seeds. So after picking up TF from nursery, we drove 5 minutes down the road to the store. They had a modest display of Thompson seeds, with their beautiful pictures on the front and detailed description on the back, but no peas. I checked again and then looked down at the floor. There were a series of boxes contained brown bags, with the tops rolled over. Handwritten on each packet was the contents – onions, runner beans and peas. Yeah!

Now usually when I buy seeds, there is a huge selection, which I spend ages figuring out which one is the sweetest, tastiest, prolific, etc. It tells you approximately how many seeds are in each packet. Here there was just one type and a choice of weights. I could have a bag of 250g or 1 kilo. This is what I call fast shopping.  I asked at the counter about the type, but she wasn’t the pea expert. She could tell me that the seeds were their own.

When we got home, TF helped me to plant the potatoes. We dug out the bottom of our green container compost, where we put all the kitchen left overs that the hens don’t have.

I could not believe how many worms were in there. When I pulled out the first spade full, there were more pink worms than compost. They had done a brilliant job. TF helped me line the potato trenches with the compost, position the potatoes and then he was amazingly good at burying them. I like to join the children in with gardening as much as possible. If nothing else, they are less likely to treat my kitchen garden as a glorified sand pit.

The peas are not planted yet as we ran out of time. My husband reckons I have enough peas for a small field. We’ll see. I googled the type and it is meant to be “great flavour”, “heavy cropper” and “a strong grower”. Who needs colourful packaging! So fingers crossed for a bumper crop from my bag of peas.