Climb away peas

For those of you that don't hang your hat and lay your heads down at night where we do, we've had 2 weeks of grey cold rainy days and cool nights. While it's perfectly normal in Iceland and we do love Iceland, this is not ideal gardening weather in these parts. Well, we have work to do on precious garden, so 48 degrees and rain be damned we're gardening. Yesterday we spread some of our own home grown compost in one of the vegetable garden beds and all the flower beds. The Amazing and Wonderful Wife planted more seeds in the vegetable garden while I mowed the lawn for the first time this year. It felt good getting outside and getting dirt under our fingernails.

Despite our abysmal stretch of weather the garden is looking good. We have some spinach and lettuce popping up, and our peas are starting to find their groove. Last year we planted peas from a seed packet that was 2-3 years old and weren't quite sure if they would germinate, let alone produce any vegetables. We were so 'eh, they're old, they won't grow' about them we didn't put up a fence to support them. Well, after a few weeks they started to grow and we figured it was just a fluke, they weren't going to do much, they wouldn't produce anything we could use. By the end of the summer we had eaten more peas then we ever have and gave away bagfuls of them. Without a fence to support them, they grew up, and then fell down and grew across the ground towards the fence that protects the garden, crawled up that and then fell down, and grew up the fence again. They did exceptionally well without a proper fence to support them and we were still up to our eyeballs in them. Well we love peas and honestly, we're greedy. We want MORE. We want a juggernaut pea crop that will blow away our prior record.

The peas we planted this year have just become tall enough to topple over if they don't have anything to hold onto so today was fence day.

I bought some 6 foot tall wooden stakes and hammered them into the ground at the outer edge of the raised garden bed, at the end of each row of peas. Then I marked a line on each stake, every 4 inches. Once they were all marked I took some string and tied one end to one steak and tied the other end to the other steak, repeat until you're done.

Once they were all tied up I took the peas and stood them up against the string so they can start to climb up instead of out. Here's a little before and after action:









Oh and the compost. Oh the compost aka black gold. We have a compost bucket in our kitchen and we drop all our fruit and vegetable scraps, left over coffee and coffee grounds and egg shells in it. All of that plus all our yard clippings end up in the bin, left to slowly decompose into rich jet black worm PACKED vitamins-for-our plants awesomeness. We dug into our compost bin yesterday for the first time this year and were absolutely giddy to see each shovel full teaming with worms. Our neighbors were probably a bit worried and confused to hear us loudly exclaim across the yard "Look at the all WORMS! Hi worms! This is great!" Hey, they're excellent for our garden, which means they're excellent for us.