[gardenmaniac]

My soil is a mix called locally as “Ginger mix”. Ginger refers a man’s last name, not the plant. Anyway, it is a mixture of pine bark chips (tiny), sand, mushroom compost, and topsoil. I got it by the semi, so I’m not sure the exact portions, but I believe it was one tractor bucket-full of each- mixed well and repeated. Anyway, the soil is four years aged and used amended only with organic materials (compost from home, black cow, and composted seaweed) and usually top dressed halfway through the growth cycle by a generic organic garden fertilizer produced locally including ground up sea creature by-products from the coast. Synthetic fertilizers are not needed. Next year I will get a dump truck of just mushroom compost to rejuvenate the garden soil. We do not have good mulch alternatives to pine straw here, so I don’t have the luxury of it helping my soil. I use pine straw and then in the fall, rake off the sun-pulverized bits onto our garden path so it doesn’t alter the garden pH too much.

Your late planting (and early warm weather) probably had more to do with your production than your soil and fertilizing. It sounds like your soil is optimal and that environmental conditions were more of a factor. I don’t know about Houston, but this year we have had at least three weeks of 80F temps. After the third week, my plants said “Forget it!” and started browning from the bottom (as you see in the picture) and stopped producing flowers and started focusing on maturing the pods no matter how small they were . My last snow pea crop was planted at the end of December. The shelling peas were planted late the third week of January. I only got a cup of shelled peas from that planting- the warm weather came too soon .

Sorry about hijacking this thread, but it is about peas…

Tiffanie