Your Small Kitchen Garden

For the past six installments, Your Small Kitchen Garden has been all about getting a garden ready for planting, and then starting seeds in the ground. If you’ve been following along, you’ve read about how I plant peas. I crowd my pea seeds, and provide a strong trellis for them to climb. By the end of the pea season, each trellis resembles a thick hedge of pea plants stretching five or six feet high.

Plant Peas Now

In hardiness zones six and lower, it’s not too late to plant peas. Especially if you’re still getting overnight frost, if you can work the soil, you can plant just about any variety of pea and expect success. However, as your region’s last expected frost date approaches (mine is but 10 days away), you’re flirting with “too late.” Your peas may start strong in the cooler weeks, but any significant early heat could kill the plants—or at least stunt their growth.

I’ve planted peas as late as three weeks after the last frost date and still had terrific yields. At that point I probably wouldn’t have planted at all if not for wilt-resistant varieties of peas. It’s a little sad to choose varieties for any characteristic other than flavor, but I’ve yet to grow a pea variety that was less than awesome. Around here, I can reliably buy Wando pea seeds, and they stand up remarkably well against the heat of early summer.

In this video, I wordlessly summarize how I prepare the soil in a row in my small kitchen garden. Then I narrate the steps as I plant a row of peas and erect a trellis for them. Please enjoy:

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