Try Peas this Winter
By Bob Randall, Ph. D.
Winter 1998

 

There are several types of peas you should consider growing this winter.   This is because they are tasty, nutritious, and if bought at the grocery, expensive.   Most importantly, snap peas and shelling peas are very easy to grow, and snap peas produce abundantly.

 

Edible Podded Peas

 

There are two types of peas whose pods are good to eat: snap peas and snow peas.  Snow peas (or sugar peas) produce huge numbers of tender succulent pods.  We harvest them before the pods toughen and the seed peas inside get large.

 

Snap peas produce pods that are still tender when the peas are big enough to eat.  They rarely develop the sweetness or tender texture of sugar peas picked at a young stage, but they are still tasty.  Because the pods are more mature than the sugar peas, you may also need to pull strings from the pods before serving.

 

Because you harvest and eat both the pod and peas, snaps are far more productive than other types of pea.  The pods can be sautéed, stir fried, steamed, boiled, or eaten raw as a snack or in salad.

 

Both types of edible podded peas are high in disease-preventing fiber, and contain significant protein and vitamins.  One half cup of cooked pods contains 64% of needed Vitamin C, 16% of the iron, and 12% of the folate an adult needs.  Since they are so productive, why stop with only one half cup?

 

The top three inches of sugar peas can be cut once or twice, and sautéed with garlic Chinese style as the nutritious and delicious “pea  shoot vegetable”.  Since the plant resists freezes many degrees lower than do the flowers and pods, it is possible by planting in November to eat pea shoots several months before pods are reliably available.

 

Sugar snap is the best overall snap pea.  It grows 6-7 foot high clinging to a trellis, so it resists the blue northern winds that damage plants with shorter heights and fewer tendrils.  Almost any variety of snow pea will grow here provided it is a tall climbing sort that winds don’t destroy.

 

Winter Shelling Peas

 

Shelling peas are usually called English or green peas if they are similar to the large ones normally found in supermarket freezers or in cans.  These peas are even higher in folate than are the edible podded types.  Petit pois  (French for ‘little peas’) are small and very sweet.  They are one of the great tastes of the winter garden.  With any shelling pea, you must grow a great deal in order to harvest enough pods, and you must shell quite a lot to make a dinner for more than one person.

 

For shelling peas, it is unlikely that you can build enough trellis to produce enough pods to produce enough peas to eat.  So you need to grow short “bush” types (2-3 feet) thickly in a bed and try to prevent wind from damaging them.

 

The best tasting ones are probably the petit pois Waverex, the green pea Lincoln (both from The Cook’s Garden), and the heirlooms American Wonder and Blue Pod Capucijner from Seed Savers Exchange.  Green Arrow (from Cook’s) may be the most disease  resistant.

 

Planting Times

 

Plant sugar peas for pea shoots anytime from mid-October to January 7.  Plant shelling peas and edible podded peas sometime between December 15 and January 7.  If you are in warm parts of our area, be sure to plant in December and if you are in colder parts, in January.   If you plant before these dates, you may have late frosts kill some blossoms or peas.  If you plant later, you will probably find that heat in April or May will kill off your plants before they produce fully.  If you cannot garden between these dates due to the holidays, you should plant in the earlier part of December rather than wait to mid-January.

 

Trellises

 

If the plants are vining types (more than 3 ft.), you will need a trellis.  A traditional method is to string a wire 6 ft. off the ground between two “T” stakes driven into the bed.  Then tie string every 6 inches along the top wire to sticks in the soil below.  Vines then climb the string.  Although this works well, it is a lot of work to tie so much string, and this results in a huge clean-up problem when the trellis begins to fall apart.  I prefer to use metal.

 

One way is to buy metal tee stakes 7 1/2 ft. and drive them every five feet down the center of a raised bed.  Then wire light weight fencing (such as green vinyl coated fencing) along the tee stakes.  The fencing can start 6 inches to 1 ft. above the soil, and can extend.