Gardeners' Holidays 2023: First Sowing

By the time spring officially begins, our gardening season is already well under way. The process of starting seeds indoors begins in early February or even mid-January, so by late March, we've already got quite an assortment of seedlings coming up. So far this year, we have strawberries, leeks, marigolds, peppers, and most of our tomatoes. (The new San Marzano paste tomatoes we bought say not to start them indoors until seven weeks before the last spring frost, which means about a week from now). And we're about to add our new Thai basil to the collection, since unlike the regular Italian basil, it's apparently best to start indoors.

But up to this point in the year, all the seeding action takes place indoors. It's not until around six weeks before the last frost—which, here in New Jersey, means right around the spring equinox—that we can begin to put seeds directly into the ground. And for us, the first crop to get this treatment is the snap peas.

The variety we bought this year, Cascadia, is one we've used successfully many times in the past. (In fact, we like it so much that we specifically looked for it when choosing a new seed company last year.) But the Cascadia seeds from our new supplier, Botanical Interests, came with a little bit of extra advice on the packet that Fedco never used to give us: "Soak seed in water for 12 to 24 hours before sowing; this is not required, but hastens germination." It also said the seeds could be planted a mere 2 inches apart, rather than the 3 inches we used to plan for. So we decided to soak 48 of the 68 seeds in the packet, leaving 20 to poke into any holes left by seeds that don't come up or get snatched by birds. We put them into a little jar, added just enough water to cover them, and tucked the jar into a cabinet, where it had another jar full of bean sprouts to keep it company.

The 24 hours of soaking definitely made a difference to the peas. The dry, brownish seeds turned plump and green, looking more like the kind of peas we're used to eating than the ones we're used to planting. I went out yesterday, poked little holes roughly two inches apart into the damp soil with a gloved finger, and dropped one fat pea in each hole before covering them all up. My spacing must have been a little bit off, since I ended up with three seeds left over at the end of the row, so I just stuck them into the soil wherever it looked like they might fit. 

Although it had been raining off and on that morning, I gave the row of peas a bit of extra water just to make sure they got off to a good start. Then we covered them up with chicken wire row covers—a slightly simplified version of the Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder—to protect the newly sown seeds from bird and squirrel attacks. We used this same technique to protect the seedlings last year, and it did manage to keep the seeds alive long enough to sprout, although we eventually ended up losing most of the crop to deer. 

This year, though, we may have a solution to that problem too: our new deer fence, a six-foot extension of the existing garden fence constructed from fishing line and plastic streamers. It's a bit of a mess right now, since some of the streamers have escaped while the rest have slid around and clumped up on the lines, but we'll clean it up as the gardening season progresses. Of course, this flimsy barrier isn't really strong enough to keep out a deer. If one decided to disregard the waving streamers and jump over the wire fence, its weight would no doubt break right through the fishing lines and possibly knock over the poles holding them up. But we're hoping our local deer aren't smart enough to figure that out.