As requested .

Sweet peas on the vine and waiting for the wedding.

sweet peas

This afternoon I have been trying to get the sweetpeas under control - the strong winds had tangled up a lot of the stems, blowing them off the frame and the miserable weather had made me put off doing anything about them. The result was a whole load of flapping stems at funny angles and hoop shaped stems. Today has been sunny though and it is good to have a job to do that isn't muddy so that I can still serve in the shop.

So I have cut off most of the old leaves and the tendrils - the former so that the plant's energy goes into making long stems rather than supporting the leaves and the latter so that the stems don't get caught and bent by the tendrils clinging on. It is a tedious job really and the sweet pea vine looks much worse afterwards - a gangly mass of awkward stems - but hopefully by the middle of next week it will be covered in flowers again.

The sweet pea bouquet was put together for a man who ordered our whole sweet pea crop (120 stems) today for his wife - how romantic is that?

The first sweet - pea

I suspect that this flower is a bit of a fluke - I wouldn't expect the plants to flower until the end of May - but nevertheless, there it is, the first sweet pea of the year - a 3 flowered bloom on a Matucana plant.

This year Euan has built me 2 sweet pea supports out of alder branches he chopped in the wood (guess who got a chainsaw for his Christmas???). The supports are very beautiful - even without the sweet peas growing on them and give a height to the garden which is otherwise lacking at the moment.
They are much, much better than the cane structures I usually make which have a tendency to fall down in the September winds. I am hoping that these will stay for a good long while.

Sweetpeas

There are certain things that I like cooking - mayonnaise, sour dough bread, handmade pasta - that I think appeal to me simply because few other people do them from scratch. At the moment I have a pig's head simmering on the stove to make brawn. All these things are straightforward and easy, and only time consuming if you are not already at home.

I am a bit like that about the things I grow as well - I like the straightforward things that no-one else bothers with doing. The flowers that I get the most pleasure from growing are sweet peas - and I suspect that a lot of that is because I sow the seeds in the autumn, overwinter them and am then planting out great plants in 2 litre pots in April, rather than the rather weedy plants available in the garden centre.

By popular demand (Claire) I have a limited number of pots for sale tomorrow at the van- they are 2 plants to a 2 litre pot, £3.50 or 3 pots for £9.

First come first served.

My ideal May meal - fresh eggs from our chickens, home made mayonnaise, salad from the garden and (perhaps) some asparagus from my patch with a bunch of the first sweet peas on the table.

Sweetpeas

One of my jobs this week will be to pot up the sweetpea seedlings.
Temperatures in the tunnel are over 10 degrees for much of the day so the seedlings are beginning to grow again and will benefit from a bit more room I grow my sweetpeas in Rootrainers which encourage long healthy root runs. Rootrainers are basically black plastic cells which come flat packed with a hinge at the base - you fold them up and fit them into a plastic tray which gives you approximately 32 planting spaces. They spaces are much longer and narrower than plant pots and have grooved sides which guide the roots into going straight down. There is not a base to the cells, so when the roots emerge at the bottom they are air pruned (die off at the tips). This in turn sends a message back up to the plant to send out more roots.

You get the seedlings out by unhinging the cells so that there is minimal disturbance.

I find that the roottrainers are amazing things - it is very tempting to keep unfolding the cells just to see how the roots are doing.

But now the cells are full of roots and it is time to pot them on into large 2 litre rose pots - then with a bit of sunshine they should romp away. The top photo was taken outside last May.