On the weekend, we had a beautiful warm spring day so we made some progress on the pea and bean bed. Do you remember this? The snow peas are up. I planted snow peas in the autumn so that I'd have a spring harvest. Spring is a very lean time in the garden. The winter vegies are finishing up, the spring ones aren't quite up and moving and summer seems a very long way, away. Anyway, it seems I planted those snow peas in the wrong bed. I must have been busy, on auto-pilot or just plain confused in the Autumn. This bed, the one in the photos below, is to be the 2011-2012 bean and pea bed. Just don't tell the snow peas.
Peter Cundall, in either his books or videos, has provided instructions on how to put in a rich, fertile pea trench, so that once the peas germinate and their roots grow down into the soil, they are met by this sandwich of plant food.
The instructions are: dig a trench one and half spade depths, line it with newspaper, wet the newspaper, add straw, seaweed, lime/dolomite, blood and bone, animal manure and then back-fill. Leave it for a few days and then sow the pea seeds. As you know, I have bags of sheep poo ready to go. The seaweed and blood and bone are courtesy of Bunnings. I must have gone nuts one year and bought a humongous bag of lime because I still haven't used up my supplies of lime - once I have, I think I'll move over to dolomite. And as we didn't want to use the last of our straw, because I have another purpose for it, Tim got a trailer-load of mushroom compost from Canberra Sand and Gravel and we used that instead.
