Pea Towers or That's a lot of Twine

Saturday was rainy, just like it was last weekend. Sunday was once again sunny, but also bitterly cold. The wind chill had to be pushing the temperature to right around freezing. Still, the peas needed to get into the ground, so I set up two pea towers at the each end of the second bed after stringing them each with about 250' of sisal twine. There are around forty peas planted around each of the towers as well as another forty in the middle of the row. Those are sitting under the floating row cover along with some spinach and radishes running between them.

The peas under the row cover are bush peas called Alaska. The ones on the left were soaked in a quart of water with 150 mg of vitamin C crushed up and added. The ones on the right side of the row were just soaked in water. This was an experiment that failed last year due to bunnies. I'm trying again this year.

I have an amazing amount of work left to do on the third row and the forth mini-row. I'm finding it somewhat daunting at the moment. I need to finish digging out the isle between the third and forth rows to get enough dirt to raise up the third row, but at the same time most of it is tied up in grass roots. I add the grass chunks as a base and then throw loose dirt on top. Only I'm running low on loose dirt at this point. We'll see how it all looks when I get another 10-12 hours to work on it.

With Michelle's help we finished filling in the trench at the base of the fence with fill sand that we had left over from when we originally dug out the beds. I just hope there isn't a week spot that the bunnies find to break through. They'll have motivation too as the spinach and the greens I planted last weekend have started to sprout.

The first true leaves are starting to appear on the tomato and the basil seedlings. When you look at them really closely they are exquisitely beautiful and remarkably deadly looking.

This seedling's true leaves are just starting to emerge.

If I didn't know better I'd swear this was a cactus seedling with how thorny the true leaf looks.

This is the seedling with the largest true leaf, which I think lead to a nice balanced composition.

This is another angle on the cactus-looking true leaf.
I love how the little hairs caught the light in this photo, almost like a little halo for a heavenly fruit yet to be.