Vegetables not growing

[Brunel]

Hi, I'm fairly new to vegetable gardening. This is my third year attempting to grow vegetables. I'm limited to growing in pots, and my garden is shaded. This year I am attempting peas and cherry tomatoes. I planted them in May, and over a month later they have stopped growing. What have I done wrong? The pea plants are tiny. I'm using Levington Peat Free Compost with John Innes, small grit in the bottom of each pot for drainage and a bit of fish blood and bone mix before planting. I tried Bok Choi in April, all of which bolted. Last year saw some success with cherry tomatoes and Bok Choi, in that I was able to eat some.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

Not sure, but I would suggest fewer plants per pot and something underneath so the water doesn't just run away. If a pot gets dry the water can run through without properly wetting the earth, if you give it lots of water to make sure it wets you can wash out the nutrients, putting a saucer under it allows the water to wick up and make it evenly damp and the nutrients go back in with it.
For a trough like that, if I don't have the saucer that came with it, I lay four strips of wood in a rectangle and lay an old plastic bag flat over it, blow it up first to make sure there are no holes in it.
Experience tells me that growing in pots is never quite as good as growing in the ground, even when the pots seem plenty big enough. I think it is a matter of consistency, pots will cool down and heat up more than the ground for a start, and the moisture level will vary less in the ground, you can compensate for this to a degree by packing pots together with something to make a larger mass.
My very first garden was a tiny square in Brixton, I was a driver for a builder and used to truck to get rid of bags and bags of rubble and two layers of tarmac that had been put on top of the original concrete path, it was worth it in the long run and left something much nicer than I found.

 

[Mystic Moon Tree]

They look pretty healthy & well grown to me for only a month or 2 of growth. They probably need to be uppotted to larger pots & need a less mulchy barky soil with finer material like peat moss, coir & vermeculite. The tomatos esspecially are heavy feeders. I have more success in a wine barrel sized pot or in ground with G&B blue ribbon soil amended with vermeculite, nectar of the gods liquid fertalizer & diluted chicken maneur. Tomatoes want full sun & LOTs of water so if you will keep them in a pot I would do a water catch. Tomatos do not tollerate cold temps at all. That & sometimes chemicals leaching from a poor quality pot can retard their growth. They also can be stunted from not enough space to spread their roots out. Squash & lettuce are like that & just don't do as well when confined to pots. Rarely will you get a good squash, bean, pea, or tomato harvest from a container, unless its big. Sometimes plants rest in their above ground growth to better develope their roots and temperature plays a big part with both peas & tomatos. Personally my beans, legumes, tomatos, squash & roses have all been wierd this year because of the long late winter & the temperature swings, so sometimes its just a climactic event too.