Phew! I’ve been on a mission to use peas in the early season to add nitrogen to my soil, and it feels like every day I learn a new little tidbit that makes that dream drift a little farther away.

Should be easy, you say! That’s what I thought too. Here’s where things have gone since I started this journey:

Peas add nitrogen to the soil!

This is awesome! I friggin’ love peas! I don’t eat them very often, but I really enjoy them when I do. I’ll plant a ton of peas, get to eat a ton of peas, and not have to worry about fertilizing my soil! Right? Not quite.

Peas need microbes to add nitrogen to the soil!

Okay, this got pretty interesting. It turns out that it’s a symbiotic relationship between peas and soil microbes that do the nitrogen fixing. The microbes infect the pea’s roots, and then exchange materials with the peas so they can both thrive. Apparently, you can even see if your plants are fixing nitrogen this way because the roots will develop little pumps and balls called ‘nodules.’ If you’ve got nodules on your peas, then they’re fixing nitrogen, which is awesome! I can test this!

On the other hand, apparently peas will use up most of that nitrogen to make pea seeds, so if you want to nitrify the soil, you have to kill the plants and leave the roots in the soil to degrade before the plants set fruit. Okay, that’s kinda sad, I’m not going to both nitrify and get a bamillion peas. But pea seeds come in packets of like 80-300 so killing some pea plants is no big deal. We’ll go with it.

So! It’s actually the soil microbes that do the work to add the nitrogen, they just need peas to do it too. Okay, we’re good here, right? I’ve got this mycorrhizae stuff that’s supposed to be great for plants roots. I’ll just use that! Right!? Right? Not quite.

Peas need rhizobia bacteria to add nitrogen to the soil.

Oh, okay. So they don’t use mycorrhizae, a type of fungi, to do the nitrogen fixing. (I need to run a test with that mycorrhizae stuff too. No idea if it works). Peas need soil bacteria. Cool cool. I’ll buy that. Oh! This one has great reviews and pretty customer pictures! We’re good to go now, right? Right? Not quite.

Peas need a specific bacteria, Rhizobium leguminosarum to fix nitrogen.

Oh, for the! Okaaaay Amazon, show me the Rhizobium leguminosarum. What? Only three products? Fiiine. One for $75 bucks. One for $8 with $5 shipping. And one for $8, free shipping, that won’t get here for two to three weeks?!

Alright! I’m committed at this point. I got the $8 one that’ll come the soonest, and my only consolation for this whole adventure is that I’ll be able to test it to make sure it works. Which actually sounds like a lot of fun. There’s lots of information about nodule formation, so I can confidently say that we should know whether it worked in about a month.

Okay, and if it works, I’ll have lots of fabulous slow release nitrogen in my soil. And lots of healthy peas.

And I’ve learned a ton about pea nitrification. Hopefully this works.