Happy St Patrick's Day!
Here in Kentucky, instead of wearing green we can plant it! Green Peas that is. Local farmers also say planting potatoes is fair game on St. Patrick's Day. I don't know if I agree with either because in many years it stays really cold until mid-April. This year however I am going to take a chance along side my neighbors. Of course I can never garden exactly like regular folks so I'm planting the potatoes in the greenhouse beds.
I may have overdone it a bit in buying 50 pounds of Kennebec Seed Potatoes, so I won't put all of them in the greenhouse. Later when I am no longer worried about frost, we plan to put the rest in the row-garden portion of the yard.
That is unusual for us because we primarily garden in raised beds which is where I planted the peas. The ground was still pretty wet last night which illustrates another reason why I love gardening in raised beds.
Last night I cleared out the bed closest to the greenhouse with a rake to make room for some peas. If I wanted to plant them in the regular ground as in a traditional row garden, it would have been way to wet to plant. I planted four rows of peas, each row on either side of a chicken wire fence.
Later I will add more support poles to the chicken wire pea fences. It was very important for me to put the supports up before I planted the peas so I would know where exactly to place the rows.
Also, I usually have a problem planting tomatoes and things that need support because I plan to add the support later, but sometimes I don't get around to it. After doing this with half of my tomatoes last year, I vowed to ALWAYS put the support up prior to planting. So here is my quick pea supports.
The other fun thing about preparing this pea bed was watching the chickens watch me. You can see the coop in the background on the right in the previous picture. I treated the chickens to an occasional worm as I turned over the soil. They were delighted!
Taking worms over to them gave my back a break every now and then. I'm not yet in gardening shape so even prepping one 4x12 raised bed wore me out. That's another reason why I like raised beds - you can work only a few beds at a time and still be very productive.
Later this week in the outdoor garden I hope to plant beds with broccoli, cabbage, lettuce and spinach. I think my pea bed is a pretty good start. I just hope they germinate well. Maybe by planting them on St. Patrick's Day I'll get the luck of the Irish!
Happy St. Patty's Day!
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