Well, I killed my peas. To be fair, they actually started out AWESOME, though. From the info I got, they can be started indoors or sown directly into the soil outdoors. I opted for indoor starting, to make sure I had some hardy plants to start with. They sprouted in the vermiculite within a couple days, and grew at an incredible speed! 23 of the 24 seeds that I planted were now nearly 12" long vines in three weeks. Peas are cold-weather crops, so if you plant them too late, it'll get too hot for them before their production had peaked. Since our final frost date is only three weeks away, I've been getting a little nervous. Seasons in this area tend to change all of a sudden, like a Monty Python animation.
It began to get a bit warmer, but our nights have still been pretty cold. Pea plants can take a light frost, so I decided to take a chance and plant them out. I figured that I'd give them a couple days, and if they died, I still had enough time to grow replacement plants before their season ended. I planted 16 good vines last Sunday afternoon... and they died. They were blanched and wilty within a day (see the image below). Only one looked like it might even have a chance. I think I may have damaged the vines while transplanting them. I went ahead and pulled them up yesterday. Their roots looked decent and long, so they still might have pulled through, but further research said that they prefer to be sown directly anyway, so I just decided to go with that. Supposedly, peas are super-easy to grow with very little effort, but all the videos I watched had people starting them outdoors.
It began to get a bit warmer, but our nights have still been pretty cold. Pea plants can take a light frost, so I decided to take a chance and plant them out. I figured that I'd give them a couple days, and if they died, I still had enough time to grow replacement plants before their season ended. I planted 16 good vines last Sunday afternoon... and they died. They were blanched and wilty within a day (see the image below). Only one looked like it might even have a chance. I think I may have damaged the vines while transplanting them. I went ahead and pulled them up yesterday. Their roots looked decent and long, so they still might have pulled through, but further research said that they prefer to be sown directly anyway, so I just decided to go with that. Supposedly, peas are super-easy to grow with very little effort, but all the videos I watched had people starting them outdoors.
Pea seeds are HUGE. That's basically because they're just a dried up pea. It's recommended that you soak them in a small cup of water to soften them up and get them going. We got a freak snow flurry yesterday, and the temperature got down to 25 last night. I read that pea seeds can withstand temperatures down to about 28 or so, so I held off my direct planting for an extra day. By the time I planted them tonight, tiny little sprouts were already starting to open up from the seeds.
The Square Foot Gardening Method details how many of each plant can be placed in a square foot of soil. In the case of these peas, that number is eight. I placed each pea seed in its new location and pushed it down about 3 times the size of the seed itself, then I covered it over with soil and watered. We'll see how Peas 2.0 do, now that we shouldn't be having any more desperately cold weather. If it'll stay above 40 degrees at night, they should thrive.