Garden Update: The Peas are Planted

Last Tuesday, we finally got the first of the peas in. It's not that we procrastinated. It's just that we had all that snow, then rain, so the soil was too wet to work. Then it took a while to prepare the bed, which had been rototilled back in November. In the photo you can see that one row is planted. I used two twigs and some twine to give us a straight line. Then we pulled the worked soil up from one side to form a long raised row. We had to rework the soil a bit by hand because there are still some root clumps from the tilled grass, and lots of rocks. With that chore done, it was easy to straighten the row,  pat down the sides and smooth the top. Then Michele and I started planting the Oregon Sugar Snap Snow Pea seeds we got from Burpee. These seeds look just like little peas (which they are), except that they are white-ish, rather than green, and are a little shriveled-looking. I made a small hole about 1 inch deep with my dibber, which is a clever, wooden tool you can see in the photo above. I bought that dibber in England many years ago when I took my mother on one of our tours of gardens there. Michele followed me and placed a pea in each hole. Then we filled the little holes with soil and patted the row down firmly.  This week, we'll plant another row of peas so that we have a succession of harvests. If we planted them all at once, then they would all ripen more or less at the same time. This way, the harvest will be stretched out over a couple of weeks. In the meantime, we're getting a lot of rain. I hope it isn't so heavy that is washed the seeds out.