Peas bearing

Last Summer 2024, Irish libraries were awash with little anonymous packets of FREE! seeds - green beans, peas, beans. Not quite anon: it was part of the Literacy & Food Education (LEAF) scheme - in association with GIY Grow-it-yourself. GIY is just the other side of the ArdKeen hospital roundabout at Farronshoneen X91 NX30. I wasn't greedy about the free seeds (we have enough languished beyond sell-by seed-packets for which we've paid ready money) - but I took one of each for planting Spring 2025.

That duly happened with beans and peas sown into micro pots [11Mar25 and 27Mar25] on a tray under the sofa as well as some saved black haricots. They were showing a week later and planted out in the polytunnel on 28Mar25 and 29Mar25. We can get frost up until the first week in May here, so it's a bit of a risk and I had a Lidl cold-frame ready to pop over the seedlings if MetEireann was giving frost.

The first peas of the season were presented to our USAian visitors on 27May25 - only two pods but much appreciated / soon scarfed down raw. Dau.II had a day off work on 23 Jun and came down-country to mow the grass and graze for food. She soon stripped half a peck [4-5 litres] of pea pods off the ~dozen surviving pea bushes. 10 days later, I went at them again, to harvest about the same amount. Americans are still wearing tricorn hats and britches so they'll know that there are 4 pecks in a bushel. Other folks will have to imagine a bushel-basket as a the contents medium size rucksack.

In May our community contact neighbour La Torbellina de Tenerife gave us a dozen tiny tomato plants of 10 different varieties - all new to us except on Ailsa Craig. I found room in the tunnel for five of these toms and planted the rest out in our biggest flower tubs filled with compost and getting maximum sun on the patio is front of the house. They are now ~1m tall and have a sparse smatter of small yellow flowers. Some of them have been visited by bees and are now carrying modest amounts of small green fruit.

There's one notably productive corner of the polytunnel where we have haricot beans, plum tomatoes and a rogue type=mystery squash plant fighting for space. Squash need more air-space than you can possibly imagine and are companion-planted at your peril. But this one is free-lance. I've pointed out two yellow squash flowers in the jungle-picture above. I think we are on a good pitch this year - in the past we've been eating late tomatoes and beans in Early October so I have 3 months of watering and grazing ahead of me.
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