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The shelling peas are still hanging in there and in bloom. Even if all I get this fall is cover crop and green compost, I’m totally replanting these in the spring, because the flowers are gorgeous. What makes these really wild is that, if these make pods, the pods will be dark purple with bright green peas inside.
From mullein forest to pea patch. The super sunny spot near the east fence got replanted while I still have a couple months of decent growing.
The compost pile needed more nitrogen so it got the mullein leaves, but the super thick stalks will go into city yard waste so I don’t have to hack them up. The flower tops need to hang and dry completely (I have a use for those) and the smaller stalks can be wax dipped to make great hag’s tapers.
These Egyptian peas are green, but the pods are dark purple. Trying a fall season crop of peas is new to me, but my microclimate has a late enough autumn frost date (early to mid November) that it’s completely worth a shot. I put down screening down to protect the seeds and hopefully I’ll see sprouts in the next two weeks. Once I get baby pea shoots, I will put string up on the poles for the peas to climb.
I usually get the saffron put to bed for the summer in April, but I’ll take late May given all the stuff I’m juggling. About six kinds of grass needed to be weeded, as that is one of the worst enemies of a sleeping saffron corm. Being buried about 9″ down, weeding the first two inches doesn't bother the corms at all. The greens/leaves should have been dry and dead enough that taking them with the weeds shouldn’t harm the fall harvest.
The Zoo Doo in a garbage can in my driveway caught some rain and made a big batch of compost tea, and I poured a couple dozen liters of that onto the weeded dirt as a last snack before bedtime. Then I put an actual layer of compost on top. Saffron corms are heavy feeders and not amending the bed annually seems to be the biggest factor in crop reduction.
With the compost topper, a lot of the seeds in the layer I just disturbed will be too smothered to germinate and those that do will stand out for easy weeding. I also like to think the dark surface helps the bed get some extra heat in the cooler PNW summers.
Monday October 19th, and more corms are poking out.
October 25, 2019 A lovely saffron morning. I’ll go back in the afternoon for a round two, as there are a few blossoms which are only half emerged this morning.
October 24, 2019 For the first time in over a week, I’ve had enough sun to where a blossom opened outside. Hello, gorgeous!
The digs and divots are from squirrels, and while they don’t hardly dig down enough to get anywhere near the corms, it’s worth it to put up a barrier and stop it before anything else gets interested.
The upcoming weather forecast is showing rain for more than a week coming soon, and that means time for Row Cover 2.0. I used the “don’t overthink” strategy that work for the peas in the back, and stretched chicken wire over the bed, raised up on the bordering cinderblocks and with bricks where necessary. Then I clipped the plastic sheeting over the wire. There’s room for flowers to do their thing, and it should keep the bed surface warmer which theoretically will help the bloom.
October 9, 2019, and after that first frosty night, the saffron is just trucking along. That first picture, looking down on the bed while standing on its west edge still almost looks like nothing, but when I stand down in the driveway, along the bed’s east edge, now looking across it, it’s more apparent I’ve got corm tips coming up around all of the edges of the bed first.
