She sits amongst the Rainbow Chard and Peas

Don't you just love Music Hall songs?

These olive green peas with dark plum and indigo spots are the seeds for Kent Blue, a fantastic old fashioned, slightly knobbly mangetout pea which I was very taken with last year. The peas are not blue, neither are the flowers (bicolour purple) but as the flowers fade they go to pale and very dark inky blue. The pods are produced in abundance - I gave lots of these away, ate lots myself and I only had 10 plants. This year I have sown 2 dozen. They grow to about 3 ft in height and as long as you keep the pigeons away in the early days, they go on flowering and producing peas for months. If you'd like a few, email me on the Vegheaven address.

Here are my 2 dozen, just about to have their heads dunked under the compost in loo roll middles. The point of these is that they give a decent depth of root and you don't disturb the root because you plant the whole thing, cardboard and all, which rots in the soil. Once they were pushed down and covered in a sprinkle more compost they were watered and the rolls were wetted too. I found that if I flattened the tubes in 2 directions I could produce a square section which fortuitously, fits into a 24 cell insert for a seed tray. Good eh?

These were sown a couple of days ago. The cells have a couple of lettuce in each and the loo roll middles contain the meagre 8 seeds I managed to produce from crossing Carruthers' Purple Podded pea with Magnum Bonum. Both are tall peas. Carruthers' is amongst the sweetest of the purple podders and Magnum Bonum, as the name suggests, is big and good. It's a huge pea and nicely sweet. I hope to get a purple, sweeter eating pea. You never know!

Oh yes, and I also sowed some Rainbow Chard and planted some lilies in pots.