Perhaps the hardest part about growing peas is getting them to hold still for their first photo … man those little guys can grow! This popular garden vegetable is but one of a wide array of what are known as 'legumes'.
Well-known legumes include alfalfa, clover, peas, beans, lentils, lupins, mesquite, carob, and peanuts. They occupy a special place in both the human diet and our environment and deserve prominence in your garden. Not only are they good for you as a high-quality source of protein and soluble fiber, but, because the mycorrhizal fungi (Rhizobium spp.) that colonize their roots add nitrogen (N) to the soil and improve its structure with a sticky substance called “glomalin”, they are also very, very, good for your garden soil and for helping to sequester carbon.
Because of this, they favorably impact crops following them in a rotation for at least two years. The preferred method of ending the season for legumes in the home garden is to cut them off at the soil line, leaving these fungal colonies behind to decompose and gradually release their nitrogen back into the soil. Moreover, these colonies will inoculate the soil with the fungal spores so that the next leguminous crops will also prosper. But here is a minor complication: peas should not follow peas by any closer than 5 years in a rotation. And the mycorrhizae are only good for about three years.
The answer to that conundrum is to alternate peas with other legumes.
For illustration purposes, one model rotation might be:
Year 1: peas > interplant with lettuce, follow with tomato
Year 2: corn > interplant with lettuce or squash
Year 3: beans > interplant with tomatoes
Year 4: squash > interplant with corn and pole beans
Year 5: peas > interplant with lettuce, follow with tomato
There are other plans that will also work, but the key point here is that following a crop with itself will nearly always result in a build up of pests and diseases specific to that crop and is to be avoided. Note, too, that the above rotations interplant a legume with a plant needing a lot of nitrogen. Legumes more efficiently add nitrogen to soils which do not have it in an abundance. As the other plants are actively removing it, the legumes are just as actively restoring it … and both sorts of plants prosper.
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