Why You Should Start Planting Peas Right Now
If you’re itching to shovel the snow off your garden bed and plant some seeds, peas are the escape you’re looking for. I’ve extolled the power of peas in the past, but I’ve barely scratched the surface of their value in the garden. Peas are very cold hardy and can be planted around… right now . They are easy to plant and balance nitrogen in the soil, making every plant around them happier. But one of the best qualities of peas is often overlooked: they grow upright, and you can use them as a structural element in your garden. They will climb over trellises, giving solid steel or wood soft, fluffy leaves and curling tendrils. Any type of pea produces small clouds of pea flowers in bright colors that break up the greenery—and you can even eat the pea tendrils if they belong to edible peas.
Edible and inedible peas
Let’s start with the basics: there are two types of peas – edible and completely inedible . An inedible species, sweet peas are grown because they have highly fragrant flowers in a variety of colors that, with proper care, bloom repeatedly throughout most of the season. Their pods are very different in appearance from edible peas, so much so that they can always be distinguished. Edible peas have tender pods that are usually wide and full of plump, swollen peas. In sweet peas, the pods grow only at the very end of life; they are of non-standard color, very narrow, tough and have almost no body. Good point: grow sweet peas separately from edible peas, just so you can keep it straight, which is if you’re worried.
Difference Between Shell, Snap and Snow Pea
There are several different types in the edible pea family: shelling peas, split peas and snow peas. Shell peas, sometimes called “garden peas”, are simple: they are best left to grow until the pods are ripe and the balls inside are completely spherical and fill the pod. With this pea pod, you don’t eat the pods themselves, but pull the string off the pod and pull out the peas; eat them fresh or let them dry on the vine or just off the pod and store them.
Snow peas should be eaten whole. The pods are harvested prematurely, when there are only seeds inside them, and the pod itself is still very tender. They’re delicious raw, but retain their heat in soups and stir-fries. You can still let the pods grow until the peas inside are round, at which point they will look somewhat like peas. The pods become a little tough and can be removed and eaten.
Snow peas, or sugar snap peas, are actually a cross between snow peas and split peas. Sugar snap peas tend to be sweeter and the pod itself is slightly more rounded. It is worth noting that even the shoots of any edible pea can be eaten. Some types of peas are grown only for their very fancy tendrils for restaurants.
I raise all three of them together and their differences have never really bothered me. I grow them where neighbors passing by can stop for a bite to eat, and even in a small space there is an endless abundance of them. Very few of them make it to the shelling stage before the end of the season because you will inevitably snack on them while in the garden.
There are two growing types of peas; Peas, like beans, can grow bushy—up to about 36 inches—or grow up to eight feet tall. To use them as structural elements, you need tall plants; I don’t even bother with the bush type. My favorite old reliable pea is Alderman .
How to grow peas
Pea seeds are simply dried peas, so unlike many other seeds, they are easy to hold and separate. They are planted about an inch deep and the easiest way to do this is to simply place one on the soil and use your fingertip to press it into the soil an inch. You should grow them about two inches apart, and if you soak the peas overnight before they hit the ground, you’ll get a slight head start in growth. Peas are amazingly resilient, so they can be planted inside and moved outside without seeming to be too bothered. They also appear incredibly quickly: if you put peas in today, you’ll be off to an impressive start by next week.
Sweet peas grow in the same way, and some are impressive climbers. The key to keeping sweet peas alive throughout the season is to keep the flowers pruned. As cut flowers, they smell incredible and I give out bouquets all the time, but they only last a few days, so there’s a good reason to cut them.
One final note: if you stop thinking of your garden as horizontal and break up the space with vertical lines such as trellises and arches, you will create a much more enriching and inviting space. Peas are ideal for these areas because they will fill that space early in the season, and summer vines can follow—beans, pumpkins, cucumbers—and then you can have another crop of peas right before winter.