Page 20 - Simply Vegetables Autumn 2020

What can you
still be sowing now?
EMILY PLUMB FNVS
New varieties for 2020
Although it’s nice to grow varieties and vegetables that you grow and love, we always like to try and grow new varieties (or new types of vegetables!) This year, one of our newbies were Cascadia sugar snap peas. We’d never grown sugar snap peas before at all.
The peas were sown on 26 April. We
first filled some cell trays with multipurpose compost. We tend to grow peas and beans in cell trays rather than planting them straight out in the garden, as we find that lots of things like to have a nibble
before they get a chance to
grow otherwise - mice, birds
and all sorts of creepy crawlies!
We’re not about having a part
row of something where a full
row should be! So to give our
plants the best chance, we
sow in cell trays until they’re
ready to be planted out so
they’ve had a good head start against the above garden pests!
When filling our seed trays, we always fill the cells roughly first, then gently firm the compost down with a couple of fingers and then fill with compost again to the top. The idea is to eliminate any air pockets in the compost, as our seedlings won’t thank us if their root runs into one of these, as it can’t access any water/nutrients!
Once filled, we placed two pea seeds
in each cell. As we were sowing the peas, we pushed them gently into the compost so that they rested just below the surface, and then covered with a little sprinkle of compost to cover. Then we gave them a water to moisten the compost and last but not least, labelled them up so we didn’t get them confused with any other plants. Then they were covered with a couple of sheets of newspaper to keep the light out until they germinated.
Once they were large enough to plant out, we planted them 4-6 inches (10 to 15cm) apart in the garden with some wire netting to grow up. We planted them on both sides of the wire to give them as much space to grow as we could.
Once they were planted out, they didn’t need too much TLC at all.
We watered them a couple of times as it had been so dry, but other than that we’ve been able to just sit back and watch them grow. They also got a few weeds, so we took the netting off that had been protecting them from the pigeons and carefully weeded round the plants.
We also found that some of the peas enjoyed grabbing on to the netting itself
20 Simply Vegetables
Once they were planted out, they didn’t need too much TLC at all.