Another fine day on the West Coast and I am heading into my garden.
Today's job is to attack my overgrown raised vegetable bed and give it a good cleaning out. There is a motive to this clean up madness.
I am eagerly anticipating a veggie-growing workshop at VanDusen Gardens this weekend and want to have my bed all spick-and-span and ready to plant when I come home jazzed up about my potential West Coast bounty.
The workshop is called Zero Mile Gardening, A Four Season Harvest, and is being taught by my fellow advanced master gardener in training, Linda Beer.
The bad news is that the course has been sold out for weeks but I'll report back with all the newest and greatest four-season veggie growing info I can glean.
I started my gardening career growing vegetables, and over the years I've always got something edible growing in the garden. The dream of a four-season harvest is so close I can almost taste it, but somehow (bad planning, laziness, lack of organization?) I have never quite managed to pull it off.
For those of you who may not have heard, living on the balmy West Coast enables gardeners to grow delicious food all four seasons long.
My favourite home grown vegetable has got to be shelling peas. There is nothing like picking your own peas off the vine, shelling them right there and popping them in your mouth.
You could also throw the shells on the grass, because hey, they are biodegradable and my husband loves it when I throw garden waste on the grass.
If you don't think you have room for the old-fashioned trellising and pea netting associated with growing peas you are dead wrong.
Check out some of the modern dwarf varieties, which do not climb and are bred for a once over harvest. You can still find the climbing variety as these do really well if you have a fence or structure for them to wind their way through.
You can start planting your peas anytime in March, but the one tip I would suggest is to plant small amounts of seed every few weeks until mid April to extend your harvest period and not have all the peas ripen at one time.
The vining type of pea is usually an indeterminate, which means they will continue to yield over a longer period of time, so if you're using this type of pea you won't have to do as much seed staggering.
Peas are dead easy to plant and are loved by old and young alike. If you want to extend your harvest into the fall, try planting between July and mid August for a fall crop.
