By Mary Lowther
I have never been a big fan of a vegan diet because I floss regularly and still have my canines. Woof! More importantly, the problem with veganism is that simply eating any vegetable is not enough. The human body needs proteins that are difficult to incorporate in a vegan diet without the additional use of supplements.
Nonetheless, regardless of dietary preference, with careful planning we can supply the family with high quality protein during the whole growing season. Peas followed by beans, potatoes and corn can help fill this niche, provided they are well grown with a full array of minerals and microorganisms.
After a late start, my peas have come on like gangbusters, filling up the freezer and the table. The area in the bed to which I added inoculant has not produced any better than the bed without it, so perhaps because I don’t rototill, the rhizome responsible for nitrogen fixing remains robust within the structure of the undamaged soil.
But the peas are finished now and it’s time to pull them up and dry them out for storage. I pull all the pods off the plants, toss the stalks into the compost heap and dry the pods in a shady cool area because heat would age the seeds. Once they’re dry I shell them and put enough for next year’s crop into an envelope labeled with the type of pea and the year it was harvested and the rest are stored for winter. These peas cook up quickly because they are so fresh and they provide an extra protein boost.
Beans are coming on now. I’ve sown all I intend to harvest so it’s just a matter of continuing to foliar spray and side dress with fertilizer every two to three weeks. Legumes themselves, beans also absorb atmospheric nitrogen and store it in their roots, ready to send it up the stalk to form protein in the beans.
This nitrogen formed in the roots will be taken up by the pea and bean seeds, leaving very little behind, so once we harvest the crop, we won’t be digging much nitrogen back into the soil and must re-fertilize if we follow these crops with another one. Since cover crops follow both the peas and beans in my garden, I won’t re-fertilize the beds. I sow a combination of buckwheat with its extensive deep roots and crimson clover, another legume that fixes nitrogen into its roots. In late August I’ll dig this under and sow a winter cover crop like rye and probably more crimson clover and/or fava beans to hold nutrients in the soil until spring.
I’ll have to cover the newly-sown bed with hoops and spun cloth cover like Remay to keep those jays from eating my cover crop, but once they’ve sprouted, the cover can come off. So much produce has grown so quickly in this hot weather that it’s a bit difficult to keep up! And I’ve planted way too much parsley, again, but at least it looks good.
It’s important to look good.
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.
