Friday was a decent day with plenty of sunshine and a high of 18.6°C (65.5°F). With just a light breeze it was just the sort of day for spreading our some weed control fabric and getting our sweet peas planted.
Back on the 25 February this year I cut back one of our hazel bushes to provide us with some pea sticks for this year.
All the branches cut back were left in an enormous heap on a spare patch of allotment ready to be trimmed down into pea sticks and some longer sturdier branches for supports.
Like many jobs planned on the plot nothing gets done until its critical and that applied to the hazel branches which were left in their heap until some pea sticks were needed at the end of April. A suitable number were cut and used to support our first row of Onward peas.
That was on the 26 April and the peas are not the only thing to have grown a little bit. Our hazel twigs are starting to grow too.
It looks like a few twigs are growing although I've no idea if they’ll go on to form any roots through summer. So I reckon that’s 60 days from when they were cut back and left in a pile to being pushed into the ground as pea sticks and then only a few days before they started to shoot.
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You'll have a hedge there by the end of the season!
ReplyDeleteSo long as I get some peas!
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty amazing how nature works, suppose they want to survive. Just hope they don't compete with your peas.
ReplyDeleteFunny how some of the plants you want to have a great survival instinct don't have it.
DeleteI used apple and cherry prunings for my autumn sown peas - in spring the twigs blossomed profusely and then formed leaves. The bees loved the 'hedge' of fruit blossom and I'm sure this really helped pollinate the peas which were flowering at the same time. Even more surprisingly the blossoms have become tiny fruits, which surely can't grow on, as any roots have only been there since the beginning of November when the twigs were stuck in the ground.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it's too much to hope for some hazel nuts!
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