Hi, I am David Epstein welcome to growing wisdom and you know one of my favorite things to do early in spring is to plant peas, and I am actually a little late. You can plant peas just about anytime the soil temperature gets above 45 degrees or a little bit higher than that.

So, in the south that might be as early as late February or March and then the further north you go it goes to late March and then eventually middle of April even the end of April in far northern zones.

We are going to plant peas today. I love doing it. It is a great crop to do. Let us take a look how you do it. Now, you have to remember the peas are going to get to be three to five feet tall if you grow the tall variety or you get the bush variety but they still get to be a foot to two feet tall.

So, you want to be sure that wherever you plant it you do not end up blocking something out. This area has some leaves and things like that. The first thing I want to do is clean it out.

I added some fertilizer to the garden. You want a product that has very low, or has no nitrogen for the area where the peas are. Then, I basically just gently till maybe the top one to two inches of soil just to loosen this up, and of course this is where the seeds are going to germinate.

You also do not want to plant when the soil is too wet, and you will know it is too wet if you could hold, it together and it is shiny. I do not want little pockets where water can collect, so I just take a stick here, I just even out the ground.

Now, because the peas that I am planting needs some support I bought, many years ago I bought this nice little trellis system here and I just sort of arrange it around the area in which I am going to plant.

You can soak your pea seeds over night. You want to soak them for about eight to 12 hours and they basically swelled up a little bit. And, this will just help the germination. Now, the other thing you can use is something called an inoculant. And inoculant basically has these little craters. They are going to help the peas to absorb nutrients.

Here we are going to make two rolls on each side of the trellis support system about an inch deep. Just put them in a couple of inches apart. Just want to cover these up, one to two inches deep. Now, for a really dry and warmth of this, but the soil has got a lot of moisture in it, so I am sort of leave this for a day I will water them tomorrow.

I do not want to create real wet soil that can really rot the peas. So there you go, select your sight, choose your variety of peas, prepare the soil, inoculate them if you want to after soaking them overnight, plant them in on to two inches deep. Cover them up, put up a trellis for them to grow on and then you just got to wait, and hopefully we will have some peas here in July.

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