July is the month in which we get our first harvests. Usually one of the first vegetables that give us significant harvests are peas. By the middle of June, pods start forming and the first harvests begin in the last month of June. The length of the harvest season depends on the weather, variety, and amount of peas.
This year pea season has been very short and poor, peas gave us only two harvests.
I’ve sown Progress 9 and Italian wonder varieties, one in the shade and one in the sunny part of the garden but even this didn’t help. The past couple of years I’ve had big problems with my peas. The weather has changed a lot and we don’t have our usual springs. Actually, we don’t have any spring at all. We jump from winter to summer, with frost dates until May and summer temperatures at the beginning of June. Because of this my peas start slowly in March and don’t get the needed height until May. In May they start blooming but the temperatures jump over 25°C and the plants start drying from the roots up. This is the reason why the pods stay small or even dry before time.
Because of this, I’ve decided to sow some peas on the shaded part of the garden hoping the peas would be protected from the sun and heat, but this didn’t help much. Instead, my peas started rotting due to the higher amounts of water.
All this led to a very poor harvest, I got only a couple of kilos od peas. The amount was so poor that I barely returned the amount of seeds that I’ve sown.
This brings me to a dilemma if I should continue sowing the peas or not. I used to have huge harvests a couple of years back, but the past couple of years they have been smaller and smaller. I’m not sure that there is any point in sowing something that doesn’t grow as it should.
I’ve been thinking that I could try indeterminant peas next year. They should have a longer growing and harvesting period so maybe they will work better than the determinate bush ones because as it seems the pea season in this part of Croatia has changed a lot.
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