Photo: Kat Pearson.
BY KAT PEARSON, GIRL IN THE GREEN
Snow pea season should be in full swing! Even in my darkest veggie patch winters, when I haven’t got time to care for anything, I always make sure to put snow peas in somewhere. They are so tasty and far too expensive at the shops! They’re also the easiest winter crop. Well, once you get them growing…
Snow peas, like most legumes, much prefer to be sown directly – they don’t like root disturbance, so just pop the seeds straight into the soil. They’re pea-sized seeds, so easy to handle, and as long as you don’t let them get too soggy before they sprout, they germinate reliably in a week or so. Unless, of course, you have a rat that keeps eating them. INFURIATING. I sowed snow peas (and sweet peas for that matter) weeks ago. And they never came up. I thought, maybe the seed was old, maybe they got too wet and rotted? I bought new seeds and tried again. Nothing. Except for little divots where my seeds had once been. Suspicious. Anxious not to miss out on my favourite garden snack, I bought a few punnets of seedlings and put them in.
But I really wanted to try the mammoth snow pea variety I had seeds for. Not to mention all the fancy (and not exactly cheap…) fragrant sweet pea varieties I had bought. So I found an old rat trap cage my husband had bought in an effort to be more ‘humane’ when said rats were living in our ceiling (not sure how humane it is if you don’t ever check the trap – luckily it never caught anything). But in theory, if rats can’t get out of the trap, they also cannot get into the trap, so why don’t I put my punnets of seeds in the trap? Success! Granted, I could only fit three tiny pots, but they germinated. Now I do still have to transplant them, which isn’t ideal, but oh well, life isn’t ideal, and it won’t kill them. I get my fancy peas and the knowledge that for a (very) brief period of time, it was Kat: 1, Rat: 0.
