Peas with a mind of their own

 "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it."

I love edible-pod peas, but have had mixed success in growing them. They don't like the heat, and usually die out about the time everything else starts waking up. And they don't come in bush varieties, which I would prefer because it makes harvesting easier.

This year, I planted them in one of the shadier spots in our backyard, just outside the dripline of a mature lemon tree on the east side of our lot. For the first time, we tried giving them a flexible net trellis to climb. We laid drip tubing along the base of the trellis, planted a couple of pea seeds under each hole, and added a border of lettuce in front of the peas  (The nasturtiums you see in the picture came up all on their own)

You would think the peas would have been quite happy with this setup, which I thought would be ideal for them. However, it has been a constant battle to keep them on the trellis and off the ground. Instead of wrapping their tendrils around the netting and reaching for the sky as I'd planned, they seem to prefer latching onto nasturtiums and/or each other and sprawling all over the ground. Even if I managed to convince some of them to attach to the trellis, they'd wind up being blown off whenever the wind came up. Replacing them on the trellis worked fairly well when the vines were small, although I found it rather troublesome. However, as they grew, no matter how gently I tried to disentangle them and re-place them on the trellis, I'd wind up breaking or bruising the delicate vines.

This morning I noticed something interesting when I went out to pick peas. I found many more peas than I anticipated, for the ones hiding in the tangled masses of vines weren't easily visible. I think I found more peas on these vines with a mind of their own than on the vines that behaved themselves and grew up the trellis as (I thought) they ought to do. And as sometimes happens when I am working in the garden, my mind turned to philosophical thoughts.

The common understanding of the proverb above is that if parents will put enough effort into parenting correctly, their children will grow up to be exactly what they expect them to be. From observation and experience, I don't think that understanding is correct. And looking at it from a pea vine's point of view, I don't think that it's necessarily even a desirable outcome. After all, the pea vine's purpose in life is not to provide tasty peas for my enjoyment, but to grow in the way it was designed to grow (by God or natural selection, take your pick) and to reproduce.

The proverb is true in that children need boundaries in order to grow into responsible adult human beings. I wouldn't expect good results if I just tossed a handful of peas into my backyard and hoped for the best. I went to a good deal of trouble to provide them with a good growing location, a reliable source of water, and I tried to keep weeds at bay. But on the other hand, once children grow into adults they may take a different path than the one their parents envisioned. Try to force peas or people into a design of your own making, and you may bruise or break them. Offer support, but allow them to find their own path, and the positive results may surprise you- if you have the eyes to look for them.

Bye-bye broccoli

February 19, 2016

This week I harvested the last of the broccoli, which was beginning to flower, and removed the plants. Rather than pulling them up, I used the permaculture technique of cutting them off at ground level and leaving the roots to compost in place. That way I didn't uproot the larkspur seedlings that were hiding among the broccoli plants.

Peas, please!

Asparagus

Our days of eating fresh roasted broccoli for dinner are over for this year, but I picked the first of the snap peas and saw the first stalk of asparagus emerge from the ground.

Peach blossoms

Apricot blossoms

Almond blossoms

Almost all the fruit trees are beginning to bud and blossom now, with the exception of the Royal Minnie cherry and an unknown species of pear tree which is always the last to show signs of life. The cherry is probably dead above the graft line, but we're leaving it in the ground for now as there are still green sprouts from the rootstock.

February: Hard Labor

February 5, 2016

Here's a panoramic taken from our side patio. Mike completed the raised bed/patio paver redo necessary for our pergola plans, and we're waiting on HOA approval on those. Since the weather has begun to warm up a little in the afternoons, we've been working on clearing Bermuda grass and other unwanted invaders from the raised beds, redoing the wells around the fruit trees and rosesbushes, working on rejuvenative pruning of frost-damaged and overgrown bushes and vines, and other labor-intensive tasks. Today Mike is working on the pond and streambed, which has again been overwhelmed by cloverlike plants with thick matted roots. He also found that iris roots had grown up into the pond pump, and is cutting those back along with doing some root pruning. I've been working on the raised beds and tree wells, and found several nice-sized sweet potatoes as a reward for my labors.

We're harvesting lots of broccoli, which is peaking now, along with lettuce, spinach, and citrus. Too bad my mother isn't here to enjoy the grapefruit. We can't even donate the extra to a food bank. Although we haven't had any problems, concerns about the pest which spreads citrus greening disease have caused a quarantine for citrus in the West Valley. There are lots of blossoms on the pea plants, but no peas yet.

Broccoli

Snap pea blossoms

Assorted lettuces

Grapefruit

Taking the narrow road

Snap peas and nasturtiums

The snap peas are about three to four inches high now, and are in some danger of being distracted from their trellis by nasturtiums. Attractive as I know the nasturtiums will be when blooming, I probably need to go and remove them from the pea-growing area. Otherwise the peas will follow the path of least resistance and snake their tendrils around the nasturtiums instead of climbing the trellis as I intended. The result will be a tangled mess, and I'll wind up breaking the delicate pea vines at harvest time.

As sometimes happens when I'm wandering in the garden, my thoughts turn philosophical. Isn't that how life often works? Taking the easy way...the path of least resistance... often seems very attractive, yet it can lead to consequences that are not so attractive.

I think the key is thinking ahead. What is it I want to happen? If I want a harvest of peas, the nasturtiums (not to mention the hollyhocks) that sprouted here are going to have to go.

The peas can't think for themselves, or plan ahead. But I can. And sometimes I need to do things not because they are easy or attractive, but because they are right.

The resurrection of the artichokes and the genesis of the peas

We've gotten some rain the last few days, which is helping new plantings and making weeding a bit easier. Of course, it also brings out ants, which makes attempts at weeding somewhat unpleasant. I cleared out a lot of mint and Mexican primrose from the area lining the streambed, and discovered that our oldest artichoke has already started to come back. There's no sign of the one I planted last year yet; we'll have to wait to see if it shows up.

The sugar snap and snow peas are beginning to break through the soil. I planted heavily because I didn't know how old the seeds were, but they're coming up pretty thickly. Nasturtiums and hollyhocks are popping up everywhere too. Perhaps this year will be the one I manage to keep them under control. The nasturtiums aren't as much of a problem as the hollyhocks as they are low growing (and edible) but the hollyhocks will crowd out everything else if I don't aggressively go after them.

Here's a line of lettuces (along with more nasturtiums) sprouting along the drip line where they were planted. As with the peas, I threw everything I had left over out there- a mixture of romaine, leaf, buttercrunch, and who knows what all else. Because I haven't had much luck with spinach germination, I'm attempting to start that inside in peat pots rather than sowing directly into the ground.

In other gardening news: I spent several hours Sunday afternoon precooking eggplant for parmigiana and freezing it, and now I need to pick eggplant again. I gave up on the tomatillos and honeydew as the vines were dying back, and pulled them out so they'd stop blocking the sun from the pepper plants, which are beginning to produce. And I noticed a young citrus tree growing behind the waterfall that I'm guessing came from a key lime seed, but who knows what it might turn out to be? Most citrus is grafted onto sour orange or lemon rootstock; it doesn't do well when grown from seed.

Fall Plantings 1

We've been working this week in the southeast corner of our yard, in an area which gets a fair amount of shade from a lemon tree. We cleared out the area of weeds and spent-plant debris, and enlarged the berm around the lemon tree so we can deep water it more efficiently. It has four high-capacity drip lines which run for several hours at a time (weekly in summer, monthly in the cooler seasons) and seems healthy and productive, but the water doesn't soak down three feet as it should with a tree of this size. We also gave it a final application of fertilizer for the year, which we should have done around Labor Day and as a result some of its leaves are looking rather chlorotic. After watering in the fertilizer, I'll sprinkle nasturtium seeds under the tree out to its dripline, and mulch with pine straw.

Because this area doesn't get much sunlight, especially in the winter, we have to be selective about what we plant here. Root and leaf crops work best, although I have successfully grown edible-pod peas. This year, I made two parallel trenches about a foot apart following the curve of the raised bed, and ran 6-inch drip emitter lines down the trenches. In the outermost trench, I planted several varieties of lettuce, and in the inner trench I planted snow and sugar snap peas. Behind the row of peas, we put up some trellis netting. The trellis netting is a new experiment this year; we've tried other methods of corralling pea vines and met with limited success. I haven't seen trellis netting in stores, but ordered this from Amazon.

And now we wait!

The morning after

Subtract pea vines and add yellow squash and white eggplant transplants, along with a sprinkling of bloodmeal and a bag of mulch.

I dug up the yellow squash plant from a mound elsewhere in the yard where too many seeds came up. I haven't tried white eggplant before, but when I saw the plants at Home Depot, I thought I'd give it a try this year. Last year's Japanese eggplant is still alive, but the Black Beauty plant didn't make it.

All good things...

I've been away from our garden for a week, visiting my mother in Alabama. She's probably where I got the gardening bug, although gardening is quite different in Alabama. When I returned I decided it was time to take out the snap peas. Their best days are gone: I don't see any new pea pods and very few blossoms, and if I wait too long it will be too hot to plant something new in their spot.

The tall plant in the back of this bed is cilantro, which flowered while I was gone and not pinching it back every day. I think I'll leave it like this, as I understand cilantro is good for bees, along with a number of other plants I have.

After I harvest all the peas from the vines I pull up, I'm going to chop up the vines and use them for mulch in another part of the garden. Perhaps some of the dried peas I leave on the vine will surprise me by coming up nest spring.

Pea-pickings

I'm not sure of the etymology, but in the South "pea pickin" is sometimes used euphemistically-as in  "Bless your pea-pickin' heart" or "Not a pea-pickin' thing". Anyway, I've been picking plenty of sugar snap peas this week.

It's a challenge to find them all in the tangled vines, because these are the vining rather than the bush kind I thought I planted. Erroneous planting has not impacted their productivity from what I can tell. I prepared about six quarts for the freezer yesterday, along with another batch we enjoyed with dinner using a variation of this recipe.
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How do you like your peas?

These were supposed to be bush sugar peas, and I planted them under each emitter on the drip grid last fall. By the time I figured out they were actually climbing peas, it was too late to trellis them without breaking the vines, so I stuck tomato cages into the tangled mass. We're getting lots of tasty peas from them now.

Lots of things in life don't turn out the way you think, or plan, but can still be enjoyable. "Monitor and adjust", a teaching mantra that has gone out of fashion, is still valid.

February overview

I'd originally planned to post "overview" pictures taken around the first of each month, but didn't do it because the yard was such a mess. Mike rebuilt the streambed between the two ponds, which necessitated taking all the rocks out of it and there were piles of rock and dirt everywhere.

We are harvesting lots of citrus, broccoli, and sugar peas now, and the asparagus is beginning to appear. We're getting ready for spring planting, which we usually do around Valentine's Day as it typically marks the end of any danger of frost. I did decide to chance it and put it one tomato plant last weekend, along with parsley and oregano transplants.

This year's winter was relatively mild and there has been little frost damage. A Japanese eggplant is putting out new growth, as is one of the tomato plants, and there are blossoms on the April-fruiting peach tree.

Early November overview

Most of the deciduous fruit trees have lost their leaves, but the citrus is beginning to show signs of ripening.

Round 2 of the zinnias are still growing strong and attract dozens of butterflies; the petunia transplants are doing well, and most of the nasturtiums have come up. Roses are beginning to recover from their summer slump and are flowering again.

The broccoli plants and sugar snap peas are strongly established, but of the salad greens I planted, only arugula came up. Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are still setting fruit. I dug up the sweet potato bed and we've been working on preparing it for new plantings. We'll probably try strawberries in that location, this time with a fall rather than spring planting.

Most of the garlic cloves have sent up shoots, and the basil plant is still healthy; cilantro is also coming up in several places and this time I know what it is.

We're in the process of taking out the grass pathways among the raised beds and will replace them with crushed granite. Hopefully that will cut down on the continuing battle we've had with Bermuda grass invading the raised beds, as well as decrease our overall water usage. We had mixed feelings about doing that, because the grass is attractive and soft to walk on barefoot, but it really has been a problem to keep out of places we don't want it.

Companion Plantings

End of September/beginning of October overview

We're continuing weeding and fall planting this week. The sugar snap peas and a few lettuces are beginning to come up in the center bed, and I planted garlic in front of the roses in the bed in the foreground. The roses look pretty sad right now but should produce another flush of blooms and leaves in the next couple of months.

Here's a link to an interesting article I found on companion planting. This is the first time I've tried growing garlic, and I knew it was a good companion plant for roses, but wasn't sure how it would affect the broccoli which is also in this bed this year. The article also talks about the beneficial effects of nasturtiums, which are one of my favorite plants to line the perimeter of the raised beds. They are colorful, low growing, easily reseed themselves, and you can eat them too! It's always a trick (and a bit of a gamble) to plant them at the right time. A hard frost will kill them, as well a lesser frost if they aren't big enough, and they also die off in the summer heat.

Fall plantings

We finished clearing out this bed, except for the Survivor Tomato and a plumbago that we'll move elsewhere this winter. The recent rain was helpful in watering in the sulfur and ammonium phosphate that we added prior to planting. I planted romaine, buttercrunch, and Salad Bowl lettuces, arugula, and Oregon Sugar Pod II peas in here, along with a few cilantro and bunching green onion seeds that were left over from a "salsa pack", and topped it all off with a light dusting of mulch.

The irrigation setup for this bed is a combination of 6 inch and 12 inch drip tubing. The 6 inch tubing runs around the perimeter of the bed and the 12 inch tubing is laid out in a grid pattern about a foot apart. The seeds are planted directly under each drip emitter. I planted several seeds in each planting hole because these are all leftover seeds and I'm not sure about the germination percentage.

For design purposes, I usually like to plant flowers around the edges of the raised beds, particularly this one which is right next to a sitting area on the patio. The last two years I planted nasturtiums here, only to see them destroyed by frost. I may try petunias this year, but I'll wait a few weeks before planting them...it's still over 100 degrees on a regular basis here!

Asian pear tree in bloom

Our Asian pear tree is loaded with blooms this year. Last year, it didn't produce a single pear. It is my understanding that some fruit trees bear heavy crops in alternate years. Maybe we will get some this year!

I noticed the first bachelor's button flowers open this morning, and a few of the larkspur as well. There are also blossoms on many of the citrus trees, and their fragrance is beginning to fill the air. We had a nice dinner last night of roasted asparagus and steamed sugar snap peas, and today I will need to pick them again.

We found the pond plants Paul gave us Saturday new homes in the streambed. The larger ones look a bit droopy, but the watercress wasn't fazed by its abrupt relocation.

Nectarines in bloom

Our dwarf nectarine tree is loaded with blossoms this year. The peach tree behind it is already setting fruit. I also noticed one of the calla lilies blooming today, and I picked a nice bowlful of sugar snap peas and some asparagus.

I have to amend yesterday's "no squash seedlings" observation. I replanted the mounds with some seedlings I'd started indoors, and watered them in well. Today what should I see but a cotyledon from one of the zucchini seeds I'd planted in February breaking ground!

February overview

Here's an overview of several of the raised beds in late February. A couple of  (yum!) asparagus shoots have come up, and there are now blossoms on the nectarine and apricot trees as well as the peach. The apple tree is beginning to leaf out, there are buds on the fig tree, and I even spotted a couple of buds on the two new bare-root peach trees we planted earlier this month.

Today's gardening tasks included planting more strawberries and spreading several bags of mulch over new plantings of tomato transplants, asparagus, beans, and squash. We are still harvesting several kinds of lettuce, Swiss chard, and snow peas.

Here's a picture of the trellis I mentioned in earlier posts. Currently we are growing snow peas on it. For some reason, the pea vines fell to the ground during the cold snap, and it's hard to retrain them back up it without breaking the vines. They're beginning to produce peas, though. There were nasturtiums bordering the raised bed, but the frost wiped most of them out.  We are using the center of the "tent" as a composting area for kitchen waste and leaves.

This bed did very well the first year we started it as an experiment with "lasagna gardening". We put down layers of newspaper, alfalfa, hay, and composted mulch, sprinkling bone meal and blood meal on each layer, and planted seedlings we'd started in peat pots. (Seeds won't work so well with this kind of garden as you can't control the planting depth.) It didn't do so well last year...I had no luck with the yard long beans I attempted to grow in the summer.

We took one class from the Phoenix Permaculture Guild in which the instructor suggested using trees as a part of a food garden design, because most vegetables can benefit from some shade here in our ridiculously hot summers. However, I've been to classes since then where the instructors disagree with that idea, and since the bed hasn't done so well lately, we removed a couple of limbs from the lemon tree in an attempt to give the area more light.

Surveying the damage

It's a balmy 71 degrees outside today, and the freeze warning is over, so we took down the spotlights and frost cloth today. I was pleased to see that the lettuce and spinach seedlings (foreground bed) and strawberries (middle bed) survived. The hibiscus and tecoma (along the fence in the background) have turned crispy and brown, as well as thevetia and bougainvillea elsewhere in the yard. Most of the nasturtiums were destroyed, along with a Sweet 100 tomato that came up as a volunteer. Most of the citrus trees look pretty good, with only a few areas of damaged leaves visible, but we won't know the extent of the damage until later. The last time we had a freeze like this, the lemon and Key lime trees didn't produce any fruit the following season, and a tangerine was taken over by its sour orange rootstock. This time we wrapped the bases of our three youngest citrus trees in blankets, covered the smallest one entirely in frost cloth, and aimed spotlights at the graft union areas on their trunks.

The caulifower plants show no signs of being affected by the cold weather, and one is beginning to head. Although the broccoli plants also appear to be undamaged, they did not produce a second growth of florets from side shoots after the main heads were removed. The kale and Swiss chard were only mildly affected (but the Swiss chard was in a bed where we put a spotlight in order to aim it at a tangerine tree). The banana plant is mush, but it should come back from the ground, and I hope the same happens with the calla lilies. Surprisingly, the vining snow peas seem to have fallen down from their trellis. I think that possibly they were pulled down because they had some tendrils wrapped around nasturtiums which collapsed.

We're still squeezing lemons. I did manage to give away quite a few lemons, oranges, and grapefruit, though.

Give peas a chance

Many people have commented on the amount of work Arizona Backyard Eden must entail, and to some respect that is true. For us, it's an enjoyable hobby- work yes, but pleasant work. However, I think people underestimate the amount that can be accomplished in small increments of time, over time, and that's something I'll try to demonstrate in future posts.

In accordance with my "15 minutes a day" theme for this year, today I went out and picked snow peas. Some of the ones on the bush varieties were really past their prime as the hulls were yellowing, but they still needed to be picked to encourage more blooming. These plants are the vining type, and were planted at approximately the same time as the bush variety, but have been slower to produce. They're in the area of the last year's hollyhock jungle, and probably don't get sufficient sun this time of the year. (Although lack of sunlight apparently has no effect on hollyhock growth)

Mike built the tent-shaped trellis, which is approximately 8 feet high, after the tomato cages we'd used for our first pea planting proved inadequate. It hasn't really gotten a good workout yet. The first crop I planted there was pole beans, which never produced a single bean in spite of prolific vegetative growth. I then tried snow peas in a fall planting, which were choked out by the invasion of the hollyhocks. This year's crop seems to be doing better, although I've had to reseed areas twice where the seeds did not germinate. We ran two drip lines with 6-inch spacing for the emitters down each side of the tent, and planted two pea seeds at each emitter. I'm tossing vegetable waste and other compost materials in the center of the tent...but no hollyhock residue this time!