Proletariat Peas
Like a sadistic boss trying to squeeze the maximum productivity from their underlings, the city gardener tries to squeeze as much produce as possible from their tiny plot.
My organic gardening book recommends planting rows of peas 18-48″ apart. With space at a premium in our garden, our rows ended up being about 10-12″ apart. Last year we failed to trellis our pea plants and they grew upward and eventually fell over into a big mass of plantlife. This year I tried something a little different.
I had some of the metal rods that I had salvaged from old political yardsigns (thank you very much mr. peduto) — you know they are basically a steel rod bent into an upside down “U” used for giving the sign structure and planting it into the ground. I put one of these along each of the three rows of peas and then strung rows of twine across them to create small trellises for each row. This worked wonderfully during the first several stages of the process, but during the last week as the plants have developed pods, the three rows of peas have begun to grow together and slide away from the trellises, once again creating a big mass of peas. There is still some semblance of rows, but not much. A step up from last year, but it still begs some questions — is this the most efficient way to do this? Is this cramming of rows together the best way to get the most from my garden?
Regardless, the peas are looking real good and the pods are filling out nicely. Probably should begin harvesting some of these guys in the coming week.
A similar spacial dilemma may end up unfolding amongst the beans too. I have four rows of four different types of beans all in rows about 12″ between them. I’ve done this with the green and yellow string beans before without any major issues. The Scarlet Runners are along the back fence and the plan is to trellis them up that (tho’ we still need to figure out the “how” of that). Its the Tiger’s Eye soup bean that i am now concerned about — it is sandwiched between the Scarlet Runners and the string beans. Looking at the package today I see that they claim the plant size is 3-3.5′!!! For some reason I just assumed that these would grow 12-16″ tall like the string beans. This could be interesting. We will keep you updated.