So it's been a really good winter for English peas down here in South, Georgia
Our temperatures have been pretty mild
We've only had about three or four frost's most of those were pretty minimal right around 32 degrees
We did have it get down to 25 one morning
And we had to cover these guys and I'm going to talk about that just a minute to show you how I did that
but today I want to show you these English peas show you how much they're producing and talk about this Mr. Big variety that
We've grown for the first time that I'm really liking if this is your first time on our channel
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It's always good to have you back. So these are our Mr. Big English peas
I've got a little over a 40 foot row here and man these things were slow to get going and that kind of
rollercoaster weather we had in
You know fall going into winter hot then cool then and hot then cool just seen kind of have them stunted a little bit
But now they're kicking and they're just putting on pods like crazy.
You can see there, we've just got them loaded down with
Nice little pods there and those things are starting to fill out
We've got a few little harvests, but we should be getting a pretty big harvest soon
And like I said this variety here is called Mr. Big and it surely lives up to it's name
It makes the biggest pods of English peas I've ever seen
That one right there is about 6 or 7 inches long and you can see on my hand there
That's a pretty big pod for English peas most of the time
most varieties your English pea pods
are going to be about this size or a little bit bigger, but these things are absolutely
Huge and because they're so big your gonna get a lot more peas per pod some of the pods
I've seen up to 10 peas in each pod, which means a big big harvest. Here's one right here
That's about ready to pop. It needs to be picked
And if we shell this bad boy these things shell pretty easy
Open it up see you got some nice size
Peas in there. Now if you watch our channel much, you know, we'd grow a pretty decent-sized garden about a quarter acre
Total and we eat a lot of that food
We also sell some of it in our weekly vegetable bag operation that we do but these English peas is one thing
That doesn't go in those weekly vegetable bags. These are for daddy. Now
I like to think that all the food I grow out here tastes better than what you can get in the grocery store
But the one crop that is really good evidence for that is English peas
Homegrown English peas just taste so much better
Than those in the can at the grocery store and I like to come out here and just eat these things raw now
We'll cook them and can some of them but I can stand out here all morning
And just eat these puppies raw like this, they just got a nice
Kind of crisp
Sweet flavor to them and you just can't find that at the grocery store. I have to watch myself
I'll end up standing out here all morning eating English peas instead of shooting this video
but anyways
Now let's talk about our tunnel that we used to protect our English peas from that 25 degree
Frost morning we had a few weeks ago now I did
Originally shoot a video when I was setting all this up and installing it
But it was really windy that day and going back looking at the footage. It wasn't a whole lot there
You couldn't really hear me
well
so I'll roll in some of that footage of me actually installing and putting this thing up and
Then I'll tell you about kind of the nuts and bolts of how we did this. Now obviously, I've got the clear plastic
removed off of this tunnel structure here
And I took it off just a couple days after we had that real cold morning
It gets pretty hot in there with that plastic on there and some of the days we have get on up to
70 to 75 degrees and so that's a little warm for them English peas
So we leave the plastic off until we see some frost coming and then we can put it back on there.
Now when I was designing or figuring out how I was gonna build this thing
I had a few things in mind that were very important to me that I want to make sure I accomplished
one of those
Probably the most important one was I wanted it to be cost-effective. I didn't want to spend an arm and a leg
on protecting these English peas as much as I like them and as valuable as I find them I
wanted to keep my cost around a hundred to
$150 and I was able to do that
now the second thing is I wanted it to be easy and quick to
Assemble with as few cuts as possible
I don't want to spend all day out here building this thing and in actuality I put up a big
shop light and
Put most of it together at night and only took in about 20 or 30 minutes to assemble
The thing so quick assembly was very important and the third thing which kind of goes back to the cost and the long-term
Value of this thing is I wanted it to be
easily
Reusable, so it's easy to take down I can store it easy
It's not going to take up a lot of room
and I can put it back up next winter and the next winter and the next and reuse this thing for years to come and
Thankfully I was able to accomplish all three of those things cost effective, easy to assemble, and easy to take down
Store and reuse. So now let's look at how we put it together and all the parts or materials that we needed
So this thing's pretty simple. There's not a whole lot to it
Starting off you need just some two foot pieces
Rebar and you can get those at the home-improvement store already cut to two feet
So we've got those at every hoop on both sides of the trellis
Then for our pipe we went with a half inch PVC pipe
Which seems to be holding up pretty good and then to join everything together. We've got these four-way connectors here
Now I wasn't able to find these at the home-improvement store.
I had to order these off Amazon, but these things are quite handy and they hold the pipe good
You don't have to glue them or anything, but you can also
Pull them out and take them apart when you get ready to disassemble this thing and this last piece here
Which is not completely necessary unless you have like I have here t posts that are gonna stick above
The hoop structure and you don't want this t post to rip your plastic
So I had some old foam insulation and I just kind of capped off those t post and took a zip tie
Put it up there. So they're not ripping my plastic. So the only real figuring that was required here
Was I had to figure out how far apart to put
These pieces of rebar here
So that I could bend my pipe. I didn't want to bend it or break it
So it took a little figuring to figure out how much I could stress or bend that pipe and how far apart those rebar
Stakes need to be now the pipe here
we've got
10-foot pieces and that's what's running long ways here
And then here the actual hoop is another 10-foot piece
And we just cut that in half and then we've got it joined here at this connector here. So we didn't have any wasted pipe
With these ten-foot pieces here cut them in half for the hoops
And then for the long rails there, it's just a straight 10-foot piece
And once we had the frame set up, it was real easy to take that plastic, so I used a clear
Six mil plastic probably could've went with a four mil that six mils pretty thick
Anyway, I went with a six mil plastic and just kind of draped it over the top of it and then we use bricks
Because I have plenty of bricks laying around
To kind of hold it down at the bottom
And that wasn't super super tight like you'd see in a greenhouse
but it was tight enough and worked fine, and I was going for about a week and I came back and
Everything was still in place. My English peas were still fine. They weren't
Frostbitten or anything and so my tunnel did a pretty good job now
I like this design and worked really well for me so far.
So next winter if I need it I can use this thing on some broccoli or cauliflower if I've got some heads
That are getting real close and we've got a frost coming that could ruin those heads
We could use this on basically any crop doesn't necessarily have to be a taller trellis crop like these English peas.
So for years to come I'll be getting my money's worth
Out of my little medium tunnel here
that $150 I spent to build this thing is gonna be well worth it long term as I'm able to protect some of those crops
That are getting really close to maturity that I don't want to lose
We're in the beginning of February now, and it doesn't like we have anymore freezing temperatures for the next two weeks
But there's always a possibility and we tend to get a last frost
Late February or early March so we might have to put that plastic on there one more time
But I always knew if I could just keep these English peas growing throughout the winter come early spring man
We're gonna get some bumper bumper crops off this 40 to 50 foot row. I'll put a link below to our Mr.
Big English pea seeds so you can check those out and grow some of them yourself
I'll also put a link to our Hortonova trellis netting that we used to trellis these guys so you can check that out too.
Let me know in the comments below what you think about my design here if there's any way you
Think it could be improved upon let me know for sure
and if you've ever built something similar to this yourself, let me know how you build it, how you did it and
What you thought about it, what you would do differently in the future
I'm always looking for
Suggestions to improve the way we do things here around the garden.
If you enjoyed this video
Give me a big like, give me a big thumbs up, and a big share, and we will see you guys next time.