I planted my snow peas today. It was a sunny day with temperature around fifty, but very windy. It took me a while until I decided that it wasn’t going to get nicer and I ought to get on with the planting. I put in four double rows of snow peas (some netting for them to climb on goes between the two rows of each pair), one double row of each of four varieties. That gives me a longer picking season, as some of them produce a bit earlier than the others — or a lot earlier, if I were to believe the seed packets. Starting with the side closest to the house, the varieties are as follows:
Little snow pea from John Scheepers
Avalanche pea pods from John Scheepers
Blizzard snow peas from Fedco
Green Beauty snow peas from Fedco
I think I’ve grown all these varieties before. Any of them fresh from the garden is far better than anything from the supermarket, but except for the Green Beauty these are much smaller pods than supermarket snow peas, so they take more work to prepare (snap off the stems). The “Little” variety is little and significantly earlier than the others, but keeps producing until the others come in. It all depends on the weather. If we get lots of April showers and some cool drizzly days in May I can end up with a snow pea jungle by the time the pea crop comes in.
I spent a big big fraction of the day working on my program for displaying statistics for COVID vaccinations. The program is “oh so close” to being able to graph the stuff I want. That usually means about a week away, even though it feels as though I should have it done tomorrow.