Last year our pea and potato harvest was not the best. Of course you can’t expect to get much out of a small raised planter, during the worst summer on UK record but this year we are going to try to “maximise our return” (grow more stuff) by getting started a bit earlier.

Last year we planted our seeds in the garden in mid March, this year we will still plant out at about the same time, but we will be planting out some small plants rather than just seeds :-)

On January the 21st Bella and I put some peas into a small windowsill propagator. We also planted the potato seeds we harvested last year. The potato seeds had been placed on some toilet paper to dry out, a few months later I moved the paper from the windowsill into a sealed jar. When we came to get the seeds off of the paper they would not come, so we just tore the paper up and planted seeds, paper and all.

By the 7th the first of the potato seeds were just starting to show, and some of the pea plants were (relatively) enormous!

I moved the biggest pea plants (the ones which were pushing at the propagator cover) into toilet roll seed pots (see this post to learn about this) yesterday and replaced them with some new peas. Some of the peas are not doing well at all, but that is probably because these peas are from an old packet.

I will keep on selecting the biggest plants from the propagator between now and March, then we will plant out the biggest of them and hopefully (weather allowing) we will have a nice big harvest this year!

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