Hello from the farm,
Do you love sweet peas as much as me?
I have a serious soft spot for sweet peas. They're not the showiest flowers in the garden. They don't compete with peonies or dahlias for attention. What they do have is perfume. Real perfume. If spring had a signature scent, this would be it.
This week we did something that probably looked completely ridiculous to anyone driving past. We spent an entire afternoon building tall, elaborate trellises for plants roughly the size of my thumb. If the sweet peas could talk, they'd probably be asking, "Bit optimistic, aren't we?"
But that's farming. By the time a plant actually needs its support, you've already missed your chance to build it. So there was Mark hammering in stakes for seedlings that currently pose absolutely no threat to gravity, purely on the assumption they'll eventually become ambitious little climbers.
Apart from climbing, sweet peas love feeding, so under their trellises are some trenches filled with some of the farm's finest hen manure (matured and mixed with some of our egg shell compost).
This year we have planted twenty varieties; some specialty cut-flower types and a few old heirlooms that have been grown for generations. Right now they're tiny. Completely innocent-looking. You'd never guess that in a few months they'll be scrambling up those trellises, producing armfuls of flowers and making the whole flower farm smell like spring.
That's one of the things I enjoy most about gardening; so much of it is an act of optimism. You spend today preparing for something that won't happen for months and somehow, that never gets old.
