You just need to share and celebrate your successes every now and then in what happens in the garden. This because there is no absolute manual to the perfect success on gardening, you are also just super reliant on that 'the circumstances' and the pieces of the puzzle all fall together.
Compared to last growing season, this season has a bit better preparation in the early weeks when it was still actually super cold. But most of all, at the moment the weather outside is just perfect for growing stuff.
You can't the control the amount of rainfall that pours over the garden, but when it is more dry and sunny...At least you can add rain to it, and the sun will just do the rest.
Starting it all out!
Looking back on my timeline I saw that I starting growing these sweetpeas half of February. The seeds are just big dry peas and I started them in a little plastic container (just an old tomato container) with some foil over it. I put the peas in a wet piece of toilet paper and just made just it was moist. Because it was still February and cold, I put the container on the heater.
After about 5 days they sprouted very decent and with a strong root and I put them in a small pot with some soil.
According to the growing calender (this is really something to use, as I wouldn't have had any idea that when it is the right time for stuff) these small plants can be planted outside already in March.
I did give them some extra weeks indoors to grow a bit bigger because I was scared of the slug infestation like it was last year. But March and April were sunny and there were no slugs to be seen as yet.
Growing time!
So fast already?
Well look at that, only 6 weeks after I had put the plants outside there is already fruit in there. I saw the first flowers about 2 weeks ago and I had no idea that they would be pollinated so fast and together with that that they would grow the fruit so fast.
Sweetpeas is really an easy growing success on that behalf because there is so much result so damn fast!
Here you can really see that the fruit is actually growing from the base of the flower. But this was made in less than two weeks. Super cool!!
Now the funny thing also with the harvesting of these sweetpeas is that some of them are entirely hidden because of their color. Now in the snap above here you can see this one hanging in thin air just waiting to be plucked.
But these plants are kind of bushy and I also found a couple other ones after some searching which I hadn't noticed at all at first. More little surprises!
Cooking time!
After harvesting the peas this is what the endscore looked like! And initially I had only seen 5 of them there but it just turned out to be a lot more!
Nice little hats they have on there right?
After a little trim this is what they looked like just before cooking. Honestly, if someone told me these had come from the supermarket or from the market place I would also have believed it.
These guys in along in the stirfry for some filled bao buns which also had some pickled radish that also came from the garden homegrown. Yay!!
So this score is from the first harvest of about 5 functioning plants. I had planted 8 sprouted seeds and some of them are doing better than others. They are still growing big time and I see a lot of flowers in there so I am expecting a lot more to come over the upcoming weeks.
It is crazy to think though how much plants you would need to feed a family for a longer period of time. Planting them is cheap though. Every pod has like 10 pea seeds in there, so from 1 pea you could already get this kind of score.
Since they grow so fast I could easily start a second batch of plants for this season if I would even want to. Good to realize on that since here in the Netherlands second harvests in a season is kind of rare.
Well happy with this food in the first week of May! More to come!