Peas, Please!

It's early April. The garden is bare and brown. I look at the packet of peas. "Plant the first sowing in early spring as soon as the soil can be worked," it says. "Ok!" I says.

First to prepare the humus. This is powdery black stuff comprised of organic matter and beneficial bacteria that inoculates seeds and keeps them healthy.

The package directs you to mix it with water and dunk the seeds in it, but you can also just sprinkle it over the seeds before you cover them with dirt. I chose to mix it up with water just because. Here it is, a very appealing sauce:

Add the dry peas... this is starting to sound like a cooking blog.

And mix together the whole shebang until well-coated.

The peas are going in a shallow trench where I already put up a twine trellis.

And here it is, smoothed over and watered. The dirt is pretty terrible looking, isn't it? Nothing like the nice dark soil that comes in a bag from the garden store.

But miracles happened last year, so I have high hopes this time around!

Peppers for Cold Climates

Bell pepper from the 2012 garden.

Due to Michigan's short growing season, pretty much the only way we can grow peppers here is by sowing seeds indoors and transplant outside after the last frost date, so they can be harvested before the first frost. I use a last frost date of May 20 and first frost of September 25 (based on data for Jackson, MI), which means a window of around 120 days.

This works pretty well for most bell peppers, which will be ripe in 60-90 days (that's days after transplanting outdoors, not days after you initially start the seeds), but some hot peppers can take up to 150 days. Do the math. Even if I took a chance and transplanted a hot pepper on May 15, got lucky with no frost, I'm looking at October 15 for harvest. And I know better than to expect summer to last that long. So I need to be picky about the varieties I select. I look for cold-hardy plant varieties no matter what, since Michigan weather can be so unpredictable (frost in July? not unheard of).

Last year I didn't have much success with peppers. I started seeds indoors from an old pack of Sweet Carnival Mix from Burpee, which I transplanted outside in June, along with a poblano pepper seedling I bought from Lowe's. The bells each produced 2-3 peppers but I only picked about 3 usable ones total, and the poblanos got zapped by the frost before I was able to pick them.

This year I looked at the varieties suggested on the peppers tip sheet suggested by MSU Extension; they are common ones you can get at gardening stores in packets from Burpee, Ferry Morse, etc. Great info there, but as far as pepper varieties I was looking for something a little different (and in a larger quantity than those little packets), so I ordered Cupid (mini bell pepper), Ace (regular bell pepper), and Aji Cristal (hot). I should have started the seeds indoors already, so I'll be doing that as soon as possible, hardening off at the end of May, and transplanting probably at the start of June.

Seeds!

I probably should have started this a few weeks ago, but I bought my first seeds for 2013 today! I'm trying out Johnny's Seeds and Seed Savers, neither of which I've used before but have heard great things about them. Stay tuned for a review.

Tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos were first up. I'll be starting them indoors and transplanting sometime in May, probably a bit later for the peppers and tomatillos. I'm salivating just thinking about BLTs, fresh salsa, and tomatillo-lime jam.

Carrots, radishes, and peas will be the first seeds to go in the ground this spring, so I ordered a few varieties of those too! Now if only someone would tell Old Man Winter that it's time to let another season have a turn. It just snowed again this morning, which means the garden is destined to be a squelchy mud pit for a week or more as soon as it warms up. THEN maybe we can till the garden. The waiting is killing me!