It’s the last day of December 2020, and in my part of California, the wild grasses are already an inch tall and bright green. Why shouldn’t my new veggie patch start showing some green too?

The Old Farmer’s Almanac tells me there’s nothing I can plant outdoors until later in January, but ima risk it. I’ll be planting pea sprouts each week until I’ve got all my squares planted and we see at the end of the experiment which ones survived, and which ones thrived.

Peas add nitrogen to the soil, so although I don’t plan to eat 22 square feet of peas, getting these in early means they can start to do some work improving the soil until I get my next veggies in later in the season.

I’m using the planting method described in The All New Square Foot Gardening, using a pencil to plant my sprouts.

Rather than digging up my soil, I can just poke a little hole in it with a pencil and place my pea sprout in the hole. I used my pencil to measure how deep to make my hole. So that each pea sprout get’s planted at the exact right depth.

This process is fast an easy. I planted eight sprouts per square foot, and I’ll thin out the weakest plants after they’ve grown a bit.