This guide should be read in conjunction with my year round growing guide to peas and other legumes.

• Sow: Late autumn for overwintering Late Winter and Spring otherwise
• Time to maturity: 3-5 months
• Module sow: 3 seeds per 6 cell tray or direct in the ground
• Spacing: 6-8" apart in modules of 3, or 4” apart for individual peas
• Frost tolerant: but protect early seedlings from high wind
• Watering: peas are very thirsty plants, keep well watered
• Plant: in sun or partial shade

Why grow peas

I use a rating system to help me decide what to grow and it considers lots of factors, but the main ones are how tasty it is, how healthy it is to eat, how expensive it is to buy, how big its harvest is, when its harvest period is and whether I can buy it organically and if not how much it's sprayed.

Peas don't score particularly high on this list because they are so cheap to buy in the shops, especially frozen. However they are so incredibly tasty when eaten fresh from the plant that it makes up for it. They are especially welcome as one of the first sweet ‘tastes of summer’ in spring and we grow mange tout/sugar snap varieties for this reason.

How many to plant

It’s very east to get a glut of peas and for us it’s not worthwhile processing them and freezing them, so we prefer to sow multiple successions and small numbers in each succession. We find that one row of peas, 1m long is more than enough for two of us, with plenty spare for family.

My favourite varieties

There are four types of pea, designed for different uses:

1. Mangetout peas are designed to be eaten when they are immature, ie before the pea fully forms, you eat the pod and the tiny peas. However my favourite - Oregon Sugar Pod - tastes great even with mature peas, so it’s very versatile.
2. Sugar snaps are designed to be eaten whole, ie like mangetout but with the peas allowed to grow larger.
3. Shelling peas are designed to have their pods removed. They have long pods and more peas to a pod than sugar snaps and mangetout varieties
4. Shoots, you can also grow peas specifically for shoots, in which case you can enjoy the taste of fresh peas much earlier. You can choose a vigorous variety like Alderman, or just use spare peas that you have selected for another purpose. We like pea shoots in salads and stir-fry.

Since frozen peas are so cheap and tasty and shelling and freezing peas is so fiddly, we only grow peas to eat fresh now and we hate to waste the pods, so we rarely bother with shelling peas.

<aside> 💡 If we do want a few peas to freeze - maybe one bag full - we just let a few mature and shell them.

</aside>

There are a lot of peas out there and I’ve not grown them all, but we find these varieties to provide a nice long season of peas for eating raw and cooking fresh from the plants. For me Oregon Sugar pod and Sugar Snap peas, are much better tasting than Meteor and Terrain, so you need to ask yourself whether extending the season by a few weeks is worth the taste disadvantage. Also if you want the taste of peas early consider growing a crop of shoots, or just picking a few shoots from your main plants.

https://airtable.com/shrRVznyC4BLmyHoU

Sowing and harvesting times

Peas are traditionally sown in early to mid spring, allowed to grow on in the cool weather and come to harvest in summer. Grown later their taste declines and they are more susceptible to downy mildew and pea moth. Also by mid-summer there's no shortage of sweet tasting delights to eat, so it hardly matters and of course the beans are ready.

I however like my peas much earlier, so if you can start them under cover, I highly recommend my earlier successions!