5 Garden Secrets That Will Help You GROW MORE PEAS!

what's going on gardeners it's Thursday March 16th and it is a beautiful late winter day here on the Southeastern coast of North Carolina and on today's video I'm going to share with all of you five secrets that will help you grow more peas in your garden than you ever have before whether you prefer English peas snow peas or my personal favorite snap peas this guide applies to Growing all of them if you're new to the Channel please consider subscribing and hitting the Bell to receive new video notifications and check out our Amazon storefront and spreadshop in the video description for a list of the gardening products I use and awesome custom designed apparel and other gear your support is greatly appreciated the first tip is to make sure you always grow your pea plants from seed never buy pea transplants because they are outrageously priced I can go to the grocery store and I can buy a one pound bag of frozen peas for only about two dollars but if I were to go to a nursery and I were to buy a six pack of P transplants for about two to four dollars I'm only going to get maybe a few dozen pods tops which is only going to be a small handful of peas so you will be spending an incredible amount of money if you buy pea transplants peas are one of the easiest plants for you to grow from seed and this entire packet of seed here only costs 1.69 and it contains dozens of pea seeds this is enough to sow an entire Bed full of peas for a dollar 69 so make sure you save your money and only start them from seed the second tip to being successful growing peas is to make sure that you nail the timing that's because peas are both sensitive to very hot temperatures and very cold temperatures they don't like the heat in the middle of the summer and they also don't tolerate hard freezes for that reason the overwhelming majority of us will be growing peas as a spring crop and as a fall crop for those of us with hot summers which is the overwhelming majority of us we need to harvest our peas before it gets really hot so for spring planting peas you generally want to plant your peas about 2 to four weeks before your last chance of frost while pea plants can tolerate a very light frost in a very light freeze they will start taking damage when temperatures drop below 30 degrees Fahrenheit so when you plant them two to four weeks before your last chance of frost usually by the time they actually germinate which takes about 10 to 14 days the chances of a hard freeze are long behind you I planted the pea seeds in this bed right here four weeks before my last chance of frost because here it gets so hot in May that I need to start harvesting my peas before Memorial Day or else they'll get too Woody and they won't taste good however we had a late hard freeze last night we got down to 27 degrees Fahrenheit so sometimes you run that risk when you plant your peas a little early however when you cover them with agricultural fabric they generally make it through and that is exactly what you see here all of these pea plants were covered by that exact piece of agricultural fabric last night and they sailed through with absolutely no damage had I not covered them they surely would have taken some damage some may have been outright killed pea plants do not like being frosted on directly but they're actually fairly Hardy when you do provide them some Frost protection when growing peas in the fall you have to be even more careful when it comes to cold temperatures because the pea pods themselves are much less Hardy than the plants any freeze in my experience causes the pea pods to rupture and burst and it ruins the fruit for that reason when planting your fall peas you want to make sure you complete your Harvest before your first Frost or freeze when planting fall peas what you want to do is consult the seed packet for the days to maturity of that variety then add 14 days to that and that will give you a buffer for germination time and also give you an extended amount of time after the Harvest so any straggler pods can mature this variety right here has a dazed maturity of 58 to 65 days so we're going to take that maximum number of 65 and we're going to add 14 to that and that is going to give us 79 days then if your first chance of frost in the fall is say October 15th you subtract 79 days from that and that will give you a date of July 28th so July 28th is about when you'd want to start planting your pea seeds for a fall crop and if you happen to get an early Frost or the peas wind up being a little behind then you can just cover them with that agricultural fabric just to protect the fruit and remember this is the methodology for growing peas in places with hot summers if you live in places with cool Summers like the Pacific Northwest or New England where it doesn't get very hot for very long you can grow peas all throughout the spring and the summer all the way up until your first Frost maybe even a little Beyond if you protect the pods the Third Secret to be successful growing peas is to sow your peas directly into the ground using an overseeding method while you can start your pea plants as transplants if you wish in my experience they germinate best when sewn directly in ground and this will save you a lot of time because you won't have to go through the transplanting step when planting your PCS you want to plant the seeds one inch deep space the plants about five to six inches apart and space your rows about 8 to 12 inches apart so here I'm going to put three rows of peas in this raised bed and while you can use your fingers to Simply pluck a hole into the ground another great tip is to use the base of a permanent marker right here so I will simply make holes one inch deep every five to six inches in a straight line now we're going to plant our seed using a method called over seeding and over seeding is a method of placing more than one seed into each hole and the theory behind that is that seeds don't have one hundred percent germination so if all you do is Place one seed in each hole you're going to have numerous locations where nothing germinates however I've also found a problem with overseeding every single hole because you're using two peas per hole you'll wind up wasting a lot of seeds because you're going to have to cut and thin out the extra plants so what I like to do is place an extra seed every other hole that way I will overseed by only 50 percent so I won't be wasting so many peas and if I have some blank spots where nothing germinates all I'll do is I will dig up an extra plant and I will move it over this way I don't have to use so many seeds but I still get a great overseeding effect the fourth secret to growing more peas than you ever have before is to get the fertilizing times right now the wonderful thing about peas is that they are nitrogen fixers they have the ability to siphon nitrogen out of the atmosphere so they don't require heavy fertilizing like a lot of the annual vegetables that we grow and for that reason they make a great plant for new gardeners to grow however I have found that they do enjoy fertilizing at three times of the year the first time and the second time is at sowing seed and at thinning and for those times I like using an organic all-purpose roughly 555 NPK granulated fertilizer and that's what you see right here this is just an all-purpose bag of organic fertilizer that you can get off the shelves at Walmart or Home Depot or any big box store anything around a 555 NPK will do it can be a 454 a 444 just make sure all of the numbers are represented so these are the peas that we just sewed I'm simply going to place a little bit of fertilizer in each planting hole and you really only need about half a teaspoon or a teaspoon or so so I'm going to go throughout this entire bed and sprinkle the fertilizer roughly in the planting hole now that the fertilizer has been applied we're going to backfill all of the planting holes and we're going to water them in very well if your soil is warm you can see germination in as little as seven days if your soil is still pretty cool it may take as long as 10 to 14 days for the peas to germinate the second time that I like to apply fertilizer is during the thinning process and this is the time when we remove the excess plants that germinated due to the over seeding process now these pea plants are all ready to be thinned and they're about three weeks old since the date that I placed the seed in ground and remember organic fertilizer is not immediately bioavailable it has to be broken down by the soil biology in order to be used by the plants so right now that fertilizer that I applied when I sowed the seeds originally it's just starting to be used by the plants so we want to apply this now that way this fertilizer starts to get broken down and it's ready to be used when the pea plants start to flower and about another four weeks or so so we're just going to apply the fertilizer by sprinkling it around all of the plants in roughly a straight line then we're going to water all of our plants so we moisten the fertilizer and start the decomposition process the third fertilizing is an optional step however I do think it really helps and that is to apply a water-soluble fertilizer as the blooms appear water-soluble fertilizers have already been processed so they're immediately bioavailable by the plants you don't have to wait for the soil to break them down so when you give your pea plants a water-soluble fertilizer they can use it immediately and I think this is beneficial so you can make sure that all of those blooms carry over into fruit and you don't wind up having a significant amount of flour drop my favorite water-soluble fertilizer to use at this stage is the Jax all-purpose 20 20. it's a great product and I think it produces really good results it's usually not available at a lot of big box stores but I do have it linked in my Amazon storefront down in the video description under soluble fertilizers however if you don't want to play place an order the closest thing that you'll get at a lot of common stores is Miracle Grow tomato 18 18 21 it's similar I think the Jax is a better product but if you just want to grab something off the shelf this will do in a pinch if you want to stay completely organic you can give it another feeding of the organic granulated fertilizer or you could also give it a 50 50 mix of fish Emulsion and Alaska more Bloom that will get you pretty close to that even ratio of NP and K and again I have all those things Linked In My Amazon storefront and the fifth and final step to have an incredible pea Harvest is to remove the excess plants that germinated as a result of the over seeding process because we planted more seeds than we need we have a lot of pea plants where two germinated in the same hole and they will choke each other out and compete against each other if we don't remove the excess plants now overall I had amazing germination with my pea seeds however I do have this one spot right here where nothing came up unfortunately so I I'm going to use one of these XSP plants and I'm going to move it over to fill that Gap that's why we overseed it initially so in order to do that I'm going to stick my trowel in between the two plants I'm going to press down and I'm going to gently lift that pea seed out of the ground and then I'm going to backfill around this one and make sure that it is nice and comfortable so the roots can recover then you'll see here is the XSP seedling you'll see how nice The Roots still are so I'm going to move this to the side I'm going to dig a very deep hole right here and I'm going to set the plant in that planting hole and then compact around it trying not to damage the roots and then I'm going to water around these two pea seedlings right here the one that I Disturbed and the one that I just transplanted in order to help compact the soil around them now that we've replaced that one pea plant where nothing germinated we don't need any more of these excess plants so what we're going to do is we're going to go around to each location where two seedlings germinated we're going to examine them both and we're going to find out which one is the smaller seedling and we're going to get rid of the weaker seedling now here it is very clear that the seedling on the right is a lot further along than the one on the left so we are going to Simply snap that off and that is all we have to do this location has now been thinned after you're done thinning all of your pea seedlings you could either compost the leftover plants or you could eat them pea shoots are actually edible and when they're at this stage and young and tender they're actually pretty good hmm the flavor actually tastes like that of a snap pea but with less sugar in fact I bet you that that would be delicious in a salad or in a stir fry and with those five tips you can have incredible success growing peas in your backyard garden so everybody I sure hope you found this video helpful if you did please make sure to hit that like button subscribe to the channel and please ring that notification Bell so you're notified when we release more videos like these if you're curious about any of the products that I used in this video or that I use in my garden in general in real life they are all linked Down Below on my Amazon storefront so expand that video description and click on the Amazon link to see everything I use in real life while you're there please check out my spreadshop for custom merch if you want to support the channel thank you all so much for watching and I hope to see all of you again on the next video hey Dale what you got there buddy you got your Yak chew made out of yak milk can I have some I had some look at the way the Dale lets me take his chew he used to be so possessive and now he's so secure in himself because he knows he rules the roost he rules the roost it's his house now he knows he gets everything back

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 117,661

Keywords: grow more peas, growing peas, how to grow peas, grow peas, growing pea plants, pea growing tips, growing peas from seed, fertilizing pea plants, pea harvest, peas, pea plants, garden secrets, garden, gardening, raised bed, vegetable garden, organic gardening, gardening tips, garden tips, gardening tips and tricks, gardening hacks, garden hacks, food forest, edible landscaping, growing, organic, plants, vegetables, how to, diy, millennial gardener, the millennial gardener

Id: OkMg2FvsVvk

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023