A tangle of peas.

Planting peas is quite straightforward,  dig the bed,  plant the seeds,   push in the canes,  add string round the outside and criss-cross the middle to support the peas as they grow.  Add more rows of string as needed.

But now the first 2 plantings have finished podding and we need the space for the next lot of summer vegetables.  So while John was busy doing his outside jobs,  I went up to the pea beds yesterday morning to take them apart.  I expected to be able to do a reverse job,  start from the top and take off the strings,  layer by layer,  pull out the canes,  pull out the finished with pea plants  and that would be it.  But things don't always happen as you expect. 

One pea bed had collapsed in the first winter winds and we'd had to re-string and re-stake,  this meant that it was all tangled up and took forever to get apart - knotted string tangled with pea plants and too many canes.  The second pea bed wasn't as bad,  but still ended up as a huge tangled mass,  after a while I managed to get the canes out and eventually de-tangled the string - some of it was so frayed and tatty that it's been thrown out, but some I've kept for another time.  The third pea bed was the easiest,  heaven knows why as they were all planted the same,  and all ended up the same height,  maybe I just got better at taking it apart.

By the time I'd done that it was lunchtime and after lunch that area is in full sun,  not my ideal time for re digging to make it ready for the next veg.  I sat in the sun out by the pool and  read for an hour or so - and watched John finishing his work in a very sunny hot spot -  but went back today to re-dig the pea patch.  It was just as sunny but with a breeze this afternoon which made it nicer to work in,  a couple of hours later the patch was re-dug, instead of 4 narrow beds I changed it to 2 wide ones,  with a path between them and plan on putting in dwarf Borlotto beans.  We have lots of climbing bean seeds but not enough tall canes to support them and I think we get more beans per square foot/metre  if we plant dwarf/bush beans. 

It may be early in the season,  but our strawberry plants are covered in flowers and also loads of small fruits.  We had our first strawberries for breakfast this morning,  with  toast (homemade brown bread)  and strawberry jam that I made May 26th last year.  To make jam that early in the year means that we had already picked a lot, normally we make jam when we have had enough fresh fruit to eat and are looking for other things to do with it....more wine? more lollipops?  more strawberry/almond crumble?  dried?  I have been looking at alternatives to the traditional mincemeat for Xmas mince pies and it seems that any dried fruits preserved can be used so maybe ours will be strawberry and fig based this time.