In 2014, as you'll remember, I cross-pollinated the mangetout pea varieties Golden Sweet and Bijou; the former being yellow-podded and the latter having large, wide, green pods. The aim is to introduce the genes for yellow pods from Golden Sweet into the Bijou line ( Read more... )

My my, how quickly summer has rolled around! This is a brief pea update with no images; I'll have to do a proper update one day ( Read more... )

It's been a good week for getting out into the garden, not only to watch a solar eclipse (Equinox day; March 20th). The morning started cloudy, with tiny breaks occurring here-and-there, but it looked for all the world as though I'd miss the celestial event. The clouds slowly cleared and by 9:00am, a thin, pale crescent of sun was shining through ( Read more... )

All six of the hybrid pea seeds from last year's pea cross-breeding experiment, Bijou x Golden Sweet, have germinated; touch wood I'll have my cross. I can't wait to see what they produce! I'm expecting ( Read more... )

Summer has come at last and I'm beginning to feel as though all my hard(ish) gardening work is paying off. I've begun harvesting Golden Sweet mangetout pods since late May. Golden Sweet is a very beautiful variety of manegetout pea. Its tall plants produce bi-colour purple flowers the turn slowly blue as they mature. These are followed by pale ( Read more... )

I never thought I'd get excitied about peas. I rarely buy them, except dried ones in boxes which make great mushy peas. But I love crisp, fresh mangetouts and sugarsnaps. Despite the cold spring, the lacklustre summer and the predations of a certain wascally wabbit, the pea plants I planted out in February are doing very nicely. The younger plants ( Read more... )

On Saturday last, whilst looking through my kitchen window, I saw a rabbit sitting in the garden. I went out to look closer; it didn't run off as soon as it saw me, but waited until I was about 4 feet away, which told me it was somebody's pet. It couldn't get past my southern neighbour's fence and it couldn't get out into the allotments. Hoping it ( Read more... )