I harvested five more peas today – four shelling peas and a sugar snap pea – and the very first fava/broad bean! There are a lot more favas forming as well as several more peas, especially ‘Golden Sweet’ (though again that may just appear to be so because, being yellow, the pods are so much easier to spot than most of the other peas) and the purple-podded shelling pea, the latter of which was also the majority of what I harvested today. There are also many teeny tiny beans on the bushy ‘Yellow Arikara’ bean plants, and the cucumber has several more blooms. The other pole bean plants have a bunch of buds but have not been flowering at all while it’s been so grey and rainy. Indeed, this tremendous amount of rain we’ve been having has helped with leaf growth of many plants and helped some plants get taller, but has severely hampered crop flowering and pod growth. It has also created an ever more booming slug population, by far the most I’ve ever seen in my two and a half years in this garden, and I now often see slugs out in the middle of the day! Today there is FINALLY some sunshine and it is so nice to see it, and the plants (both crop and ornamental) have been responding already with new flowers even though it’s just been mostly sunny for about an hour. We are to get yet more storms later today, and the Flash Flood Watch remains in effect in the area.
I noted today that it’s not just the recently planted legumes that have been helped in sprouting quickly by the downpour, but also the nasturtiums! I lost count at 11 leafed-out seedlings, and didn’t even attempt to count the number of tiny sproutlings sticking up out of the soil beyond the actual formed seedlings.
Reading The PawPaw Patch (link always in sidebar*) provides quite a sharp contrast to conditions here – in her latest entry, she writes of her peas being done for the season, ripening tomatoes, and flowering okra. My okra and tomatoes are still wee things that have barely grown at all in the past month, and my favas (cold-weather crop) are flourishing. It’s interesting, though, that we both have cucumbers that have just started to climb upwards; mine put out its first tendrils just a day or two before she wrote a post saying a similar thing about hers. I guess it nicely illustrates how some plants are more weather- and/or climate-dependent and other plants are more dependent upon the literal time of year.
*[Apologies at how screwy my sidebars temporarily were. Somehow WordPress reset my design to the original rather than what I'd customized (this was at a point recently when I didn't even log in for a couple of days, so I don't see how I could have accidentally done it myself). The links and everything else on the sidebar are back to the way they were before, and hopefully they will stay that way this time.]
The bees and other pollinators have been as excited about the dry weather as I have, and in my brief time in the wonderfully sunny garden, I saw a rather absurd number of bees and similar beings. I suppose that like us gardening humans, they have to cram as much work as they can inbetween downpours. The salmon-flowered penstemon, Scottish bellflower, and violas have been flowering nicely despite the rain, but most things have been budded up for a couple weeks just waiting for some dry, sunny weather. My oregano keeps adding new buds, but after three or four weeks, has yet to open a single one!
And now we’ve got a mackerel sky forming, a sign of more rain to come. But it is nice to have the windows open and to see the sunshine strengthen and lessen as the high, thin clouds come and go. Time to go back outside and enjoy it while I can. I’ve been working this week on a post of photos, which I’ll hopefully finish later today once it starts raining again!
I actually stopped picking peas about a week ago now, and have some drying pod on the vines, to be picked and stored for planting. Pulled some red potatoes (left the plants), they seem happy. Got a lot of flowers planted, too, and found a cilantro growing wild in the weeds. I’m going to move it. Busy weekend.
It has been *so cool* here lately, nights are dipping into the upper 50s. Very strange, very uncharacteristic for…July, for gods sake! Can’t believe it. No rain lately, though, and none called for for the next week.
I just picked some more peas when I got home today. I’m amazed that several ofthem are flowering when it’s about 80 F out- I’m actually not sure I’ve seen peas flowering when it was this hot before.
It’s still typically cool here at night, though, even with this warmer daytime weather. Sometimes it is getting into the mid to lower 50s F here at night. It is allegedly possibly going to rain here tomorrow or the next day. We’ll see. Yesterday was the most watering I’d done in at least a couple of weeks- did most of the crops and some of the recently planted plants.
I forgot to say that I wonder if the flowers will drop off without forming pea pods.
My peas are still flowering, too, into the hot weather. I was wondering the same thing.
(Insert shock and awe) I appear to have a second small harvest of peas coming. Some vines actually have dry pods at the bottom and new pods forming at the top.
Wow, that’s cool. I noticed several new peas forming this morning as well despite the fact that it has been in the low 80s here most days. Perhaps the cooler evening temps have been helping.
Yeah, I’m not sure what’s up with that. Some flower when it’s hot, some when it’s cool and rainy, others seem to only flower when it’s pleasant (to a pea plant, say 65 F) and sunny. I’m also perplexed as to why some have picked now to start yellowing, when it’s not hot by pea plant standards!