Garden progress and starting sweet peas
We’ve been working on our garden-to-be. The One Who Builds is making fantastic raised beds, which will be mostly for veggies.
Now, don’t you be like the garden lady who said You’re way behind! You should have started in February!
That is all nonsense. It’s June. We are many months early for next February. Also, we are way ahead of schedule for planting garlic, garlic, and garlic this fall.
There will be flowers, too. I like sweet peas because they show such ambition and spirit when they climb way above my head, and because they’re gorgeous and fragrant. Also, their stems don’t turn to mush if you leave them in a vase for two weeks and forget about them. Sweet peas are beautiful and hassle-free even in death.
So, the photos. The first is of sweet pea seeds; they sprout in a puddle between two layers of paper towel on a cookie sheet. There are other ways to start sweet peas, but I like this one best because I like to snoop up on everybody’s progress. No point planting dud seeds, after all: only the sprouters make it to the next stage.
The next stage is eggshells; they’re perfect starter pots. When it’s time for the plants to go into the ground, I’ll crack those eggshells (leaving them in place around the starter plant) and plant sweet pea seedlings with the cracked eggshells around them. City gardeners using standard commercial eggs might not need to do that, but past experience with Gabriola farm eggs shows that un-cracked eggshells don’t break down enough to let the plant’s roots go down into the soil.
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