Growing Peas, from Seed to Harvest (FULL GROW GUIDE).

If you think you hate peas, blame the grocery store, because the second a pea is harvested, the delicious sugars inside quickly turn to starch. That is why a homegrown pea is called garden's candy. It is sweet, it's crisp, it's delicious, and honestly, they almost never make it into the kitchen. I'm Jacques from Epic Gardening, and I've been snacking on peas straight off the vine for the past six years. And if you're interested in growing peas yourself, then you should know the one major thing, which is that they love cool weather. Late fall, early spring, those are the golden windows, and that means you get two harvests every single year. And best of all, peas are easy to grow. Whether you have a huge in-ground garden or just a couple containers on a patio, you could definitely grow them. So join me on this seed-to-harvest guide where I'll walk you through everything you need to know about growing peas, including choosing the best varieties, sowing and transplanting them, and when to pick them for their maximum sweetness. So now let's talk about varieties and actually getting these peas started and in the ground. The first one I wanna talk about, because there's basically three major categories of peas, is the snow pea. Now, snow peas are the ones where you eat the entire pod, but they're very flat, they're usually not plump. You oftentimes see them in stir-fries, and I have two great varieties here for you, Oregon Sugar Pod 2 and Mammoth Melting. So again, you eat the entire thing in this case. Now, the next one is my personal favorite. I think it's severely underrated, and that is the shelling pea. Now, most people think of peas, they think of canned peas, frozen peas, maybe mushy peas, but have you ever actually had a fresh shelling pea out of the garden? If you haven't, you don't actually know anything about peas, because these things are as close to nature's candy as I could imagine. They are so good and delicious fresh out of the garden. I have three of my favorite varieties here. Progress number nine. The great thing about this one is that it's not a very tall plant. It only gets about 18 inches, so you don't really need any staking. Then we have Wando, which is the one I will be starting today, because it is a heat-tolerant variety. So if you live somewhere where spring gets hot a little bit early, Wando might be a great choice for you. And then another sort of separate category, this one's a petite shelling pea, Little Marble. We'll also be starting this one because it's a great container variety. I'll show you exactly how to get that started in a container at home. Then there is the last category of peas. These are the interesting ones. They're snap peas. These are actually a cross of both the snow and shelling pea. And again, in this case, you eat the entire pod. With the shelling peas, you're only eating the inside. The outside is extremely tough and fibrous. You just eat the little peas inside. But with snap, you get a combination of the shelling and the snow pea. You eat the entire pod. It's nice, crunchy, crisp, delicious. And there's still a pea inside. So it's a little bit more food per bite you're getting compared to something like a snow pea. I personally love snap peas. I actually kind of love all peas. So with all that being said, the two varieties I chose here are Sugar Magnolia, which has a beautiful purple hue to it. And then the other one is Sugar Snap, which is the classic. So now let's talk about getting these started because they can be tricky if you want to transplant them. So now I've set aside four different peas that we're going to follow all the way through. The first one is going to be the Oregon Sugar Pod No. 2. I'm going to start two 6-cells of that and two 6-cells of the shelling Wondo pea. Now, there is something you should know about peas, and that is that they really do not like being transplanted. Now, there is a way around that. I do it all the time in the garden. And don't worry too much if that's something that you struggled with in the past. Now, you could do this with either a regular container, just like our Epic 6-cells here. And I will also show you how you could do it with free containers, or at least the byproduct of something you're already producing at home, which is leftover toilet paper rolls, another great way to avoid root disturbance. Now, when it comes to actually starting the peas, I like to just do it like this. I'll just take all my peas. I'll set it right on top of the soil where I want them. And then once I have all my peas laid out where I want them, I just take my finger and I just push them down until I basically get to the end of my nail. That should give you just enough depth. You want to essentially go two times the depth of the width of the seed. Then we'll just top this off with a little bit of soil to make sure that they're properly buried. And then we just need to water those in in about five to 10 days. We should see the seedlings emerge from here. And when you transplant peas, you want to act quick. But again, we'll revisit that a little bit later. So now what about these toilet paper rolls? The beautiful thing about these is that when you're using them, you're not actually disturbing any roots at all. You're just planting this entire pot right into the ground once it's ready. Now, the first thing you want to do though is actually prepare it so it can hold soil. So if you just fold over one side like that, fold over the other, pinch the other one down, pinch the other one down. You're not trying to get something perfect. You just want something essentially flat. Now, if you are concerned, you could go in with like a pen and try to smooth out the bottom so that it looks like it's fully covered. So if you take a look at that, again, not perfect. There's a hole right out the bottom, no big deal. Because what we're going to do now is just go ahead and fill that with soil. So now we've got our free toilet paper pots ready to go. And it's going to be the exact same procedure. I'm just going to take my seed, put it right on top, and then push it in. And now what we'll do is we'll move on over to planting directly into the grow bag with those little marble peas. So in this case, we're going to be using a 10-gallon grow bag. You could use whatever container you want or just in the ground or in a raised bed, literally however you want to grow your peas. And I'm just going to top this off with a little bit of strawberry-fueled box farm soil here, just to the top there. And now it's time to direct sow or place the seed directly where you want to grow it. Now, whatever I'm saying here is true for containers, raised beds, grow bags, in-ground, whatever it is you want to use, same principles apply. You basically want to keep about two inches between each pea. And then for a container, I'm also going to try to go about two inches from the edge. Now, my thumb is roughly two inches. So right about there is about two inch. I'm going to place my pea seed. And then every two inches, I'm going to place another one. The reason why this works in this case especially is that the little marble pea, which is the one that we're planting here, is a compact plant. It's not one that needs trellises. That's something I didn't really mention earlier. A lot of peas can get like six, seven feet tall. Like those sugar magnolia ones, the purple one, that could be like a seven foot tall plant. So you really need a trellis to grow it. Now, some of the other varieties I showed you, like Green Arrow is another compact variety. It only gets about like 18 inches and doesn't need much trellising. But this one doesn't need any at all. It's not going to produce enough vine and height where that really matters. Now, in the past what I've done is I've gone a full circle just like this and just had all my peas growing out. You could try to put some more in the middle. I'm just going to go ahead and put a couple. One, two, and three. So now same idea applies. We're going to just press that in, in, in, in. It's actually really satisfying to do that. So now I'm just going to bury all those peas that we just put in, make sure that they have full soil coverage. And then we're going to water this in and wait at least 10 days. And I'll give you guys an update when all of these different peas are up and ready to be seen. It's now been two weeks since we've started our pea seeds and they are ready to be transplanted into the garden. So I'll give you a quick look at what I am seeing here and why I think they're ready. I feel like at this tray in particular, they're quite small. They have a couple leaves, nothing too wild. And I feel like at the base of them, there are definitely roots coming out the bottom, but nothing too crazy. So at this point, it's very safe and easy to transplant these and they shouldn't get any sort of severe shock. Now, the reason peas can get shocked when you transplant them is that they have sensitive roots. They actually have like a tap root. And if you damage it, then you could actually stunt and almost entirely eliminate any sort of success that you might get with that pea. So you want to do it while they're small like this. The Epic 6L of course helps since it has the bottom hole. It's very easy to get the seedling out without messing with the roots too much. Now let's take a look at one of our toilet paper rolls. This is the Sugar Magnolia pea. And it's looking really, really good. It's nice and tall. It's already got tendrils. There's a little bit of roots coming out the bottom. And the beauty of this, it's very, very delicate. This toilet paper roll wants to just entirely fall apart. And we're just going to dig a hole and plop this right into the ground without removing or messing with anything. Now, as far as germination goes, I had one that failed and mostly it was my fault because I tried messing with it and picking it up. It sort of fell apart and the pea just never made it. So that one, that's a goner. As for the actual 6Ls, I have peas up in every single cell except for one on the Oregon sugar and one on the Wando. Now, let's take a closer look at these Wandos because we might have actually missed our transplant window on these. See how many roots they have and how vigorous it is? This is now at a dangerous state where transplanting this could lead to some stunting, but we're going to do it anyway. If these are stunted and they don't make it, now we'll all know together whether you could actually push the peas or whether you should actually transplant them as soon as possible. Now, there is one more update we have to do, which is to check on the grow bag. So I'll meet you right over there. So our little Marvel peas are up as well. And we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 separate pea seedlings up. And we're going to allow all of them to grow. That should be plenty for a grow bag of this size. I think maybe we missed the germination over here and here based on the gappiness, but still 12 plants in one grow bag is plenty for me. Now, the little Marvel technically doesn't need a trellis, but if you want to keep things tidier, I have a couple options for you. You can either take a bamboo stake and just put one next to each one of these plants. They'll climb up that and support themselves. But you can also just go ahead and throw a tomato cage on here and it'll contain everything into one little mass instead of allowing this to sort of sprawl over. Now for now, I'm just curious to see how these do without any sort of support. So we're going to let them ride. And now let's take our peas that we need to transplant and put them into the garden. Before we plant these peas, I did want to talk a little bit about trellising options. In this case, we have jute netting, which has six inch squares. But the beautiful thing about peas is that they have tendrils. And what tendrils do is they'll grab onto anything, whether it's vertical, horizontal, another plant, doesn't care what it is. It will simply grab onto it. So you could plant peas up against a fence. You could plant it up against the tree, another plant. They are able to basically support themselves on anything they could get ahold of. Now compare that to something like, let's say, a pole bean. Pole beans need vertical strands because they physically wrap around things in order to grow up. So it doesn't matter what you have. In this case, we have a nice, simple net trellis. And what we're going to do here is we're going to be planting these sugar snap peas all in this one bed. And we're going to be about three inches apart from each one. Now, the beautiful thing about these sugar snap magnolias is that they are in our toilet paper rolls. So we don't have to do much of anything. All I'm going to do here is carve out a simple hole, at least the depth of this toilet paper roll here. And just plop it right in like that. And then bury in around it. We're not going to touch the roots at all. We're not going to mess with it in any way, shape or form. We're simply tucking it right into the soil. And that's all we have to do. And then again, remember for the spacing, we're going to go about three inches apart, which is roughly where my hand width is. I'm going to go ahead and pop in the next pea. Just try not to break any roots as you're setting it into the hole. So the toilet paper was easy. Let's see how simple it is from the six cell. So for the six cells, what I like to do is I always smack them on every side. So nice little smack on one side and go all the way around. And what that does is it loosens up all the soil in this tray. It makes it very easy to either pull or pop things out without really touching or damaging the roots. So before I do that though, let's go ahead and prep the area where we're going to be planting them. What I like to do in this case is, again, I'll go three inches apart. Maybe we'll go a little bit farther. We'll start right there. And I'm going to just make a trench in this case just to make things a little bit faster. The reason why I like doing trenches for sensitive roots is that you could just lay your seedling in it and then just mound the soil around it without really messing with anything too much. So this is the one that we just smacked. First thing I want to do is see if I could just pull on the seedling itself. And yep, there we go. You could see all the roots here are not being touched. They're not getting messed with. I'm going to even widen this trench to reduce any chance of breakage. We're going to lay it right in and then tuck it in lightly. See, there you go. No real disturbance to those roots. They're totally happy and healthy. So again, let's pull the next one. Nice and easy. Go about a hand width apart. That's three inches. Lay it in. And honestly, very simple here. Just about exactly as simple as it was to do the toilet paper rolls. No problems whatsoever. And now we're going to just tuck it all right back in. Now we have all of our sugar snappies transplanted. And what I want to do is find a good place for the shelling peas. I have a bed behind me here with four corner posts. Instead of dedicating a whole bed to it, we're just going to plant two of these per post and allow them to climb the bed itself. The exciting moment has arrived. We have the very first pea flowers forming on our little Marvel pea. Now remember, this is the one in a grow bag that is a dwarf size plant. And it even lists that you don't really need a trellis. Now, so far that has been true. We do have a little bit of a lean going this way. So I wanted to at least put in the option that if you don't want it to like fall over or lean in a certain way, we could at this point go ahead and just put a simple bamboo stake in. Something as simple as that to just keep them upright is really all you need because they're all tangling into each other. They're all tendriling. And soon they'll attach to the stake as well. So very happy with this progress. We'll probably have a harvest in not too long, maybe just a couple of weeks now. As for the rest of the peas, they are looking really good. This one is almost three feet in height. These guys are about two and they are covered in flowers. The purple flowers here are really quite stunning. One of the most beautiful regular pea flowers I've grown outside of course of sweet peas. And then this guy, the Oregon sugar even has a little pea formed and there's a ton of flowers on the way. So at this point, the things that you want to kind of keep an eye out on is making sure there isn't signs of powdery mildew. If there is, maybe prune it out a little bit to allow more airflow and make sure that the tendrils are actually grabbing onto your trellis. Like right here, these are leaning pretty far back. If I wanted to, I could take a string and just tie it like this up against the peas and the trellis and that'll keep them nice and snug. But we're looking really good now. Soon we'll be into the harvest. 10 weeks ago, we sowed our peas and today they are well beyond ready to harvest. In fact, two weeks ago at the eight week mark, I got the first piece harvested off this plant, which puts this at 56 days to maturity. The seed packets is 55 to 60. So that's fantastic. We know that we're going to hit that mark. The other thing I want to point out is that this is the little marble pea, the one that I basically talked about trellising. It's an option. You don't really have to. As you can see, even this deep into the process, it really doesn't need a trellis. Yes, it is spilling out the edge. Yes, the one bamboo stake I had is doing some work, but if you're looking for a pea that doesn't take over your garden or a pea that doesn't require that much training or trellising, the little marble is the pea for you because this thing is pretty prolific for what it is. I mean, we put a lot of pea plants in a single grow bag and it's hard to tell, but there's quite a few peas on here. So the next thing I want to talk about is basically how to know when to harvest your shelling pea. Now, if you look at it when it first comes out, it's essentially a flat thing. You could see the little bumps where the peas are forming, but that's not when you're going to want to eat it. Shelling peas, you don't eat the whole pod. It's very fibrous. It's not pleasant. I know from experience. So just letting you know that you could try it for yourself. In fact, trying peas for yourself is the best way to know when they are ready to be harvested because the definition for when a pea is ready to be harvested is actually quite broad. It's essentially what is your preference and what you like to do with it and how you like to eat it. So we're going from a flat pod. Then we're starting to get some nice swelling on the pod. You're starting to see that it's starting to fill out. It's looking round. This is basically at the intermediate stage where it's almost at its like max harvest potential. You could definitely eat it at this point, but if you wait a little bit longer, you will get more pea. Now there is another point where actually if you go too long, you'll start to see that the pea is going to get all shriveled and shrink. So right here is an example of one that has not done that. This is a pea that is still looking really fresh. It's nice and plump. It has a little bit of wrinkles on it, but it's not like starting to become translucent and really thin in the skin. I'll show you what that looks like in a moment here. But this is one that I would wager is a 50% chance of being either too starchy and not just right. But upon cracking it open, what I'm seeing here is if you look at that, it's a really vibrant, bright green color. There's like no grayness to it. They're still kind of round. They're not squared off. So this actually might still be a very sweet shelling pea. So let's give it a try. And that is absolutely lovely. So fresh and delicious. Basically, if your pea is overripe, you will know because your mouth will taste all starchy. And actually, in fact, I do get a little backbite of the starch there. So as soon as you start to see the ridges and wrinkles forming on the outside of your pea, that is basically not the best for fresh eating, but will absolutely be delicious when cooked up in the kitchen. So we'll set that guy aside. And what I want to do is show you a collection of peas that I made from various ripenesses. So if we take a look from left to right here, what we're going to be seeing here is something very interesting. So on the far end here, this is the flat pea. As you can see, there's basically nothing really formed in there. There's no point in harvesting at that point. Over here, they're starting to fill out the pod. There's a little bit of fatness to it. And you can see that they are forming. They do taste sweet, but you're really not getting much out of that. So it's not worth harvesting at this point. But then you get to this one here where the outside is entirely smooth. There's really no wrinkles forming and the peas themselves are very round. They're very bright green compared to the one over here that has almost like a gray overcast. So as we get further to the edge here, they're starting to get starchier. They're not going to be as good as garden snacks fresh out of the garden. As you can see on the outside of this pea, it has that kind of mottled texture. It's starting to shrivel and shrink. That is a pea that has gone full starchy. But the beautiful thing about all this is that that starchy pea, it's not trash. It's actually absolutely delicious. You can throw it in soups. You can saute it with a little bit of butter and it will still taste incredible. It just won't be as good for fresh eating. So now the next thing I want to do here is harvest as many peas as we can and see what is on this plant. And I'll show you the final harvest right here. Here's what we have off the Little Marvel, right around 40 ripe shelling peas. Now these are all fantastic. Some of them I could definitely eat fresh right now, but most of them are ready to be cooked in a little bit of butter, a lot of dill, and some carrots for a wonderful little side dish or a snack straight from the garden. Now remember, this is a Little Marvel. It's not the biggest pea out there. It's in a grow bag and there's only about nine or 10 plants in here and you could get a harvest like this. And not only that, but on the plant already is probably the equivalent amount of peas that are still forming and are not yet mature. So a very productive plant that doesn't take up that much space. And now let's check on the other peas. We've got the shelling and the snaps. The next pea that we're looking at here is the snow pea. These tend to have very sort of airy looking pods. They tend to kind of swell up and have a lot of empty space in them. And this is another one that is really good fresh out of the garden. Now that we all have a bountiful, beautiful harvest of peas, let's go over a quick and easy recipe that you will absolutely love. The first thing you're going to do is wash your snap peas. In this case, I'm using snaps. And then we're going to just peel off the string on each pod, which is really easy to do. You just break one end of the pea, pull it down and the string comes off with it. Once you've done that, we can either go into a hot pan with butter or olive oil. In this case, I'm going to do a little bit of olive oil, maybe a little more. Some people like to cut their snap peas in half or into little sections, but I'm going to leave them whole because they're more fun to eat that way, at least in my opinion. Into the pan. And I got a big pan because I want them all in an even layer so they quickly caramelize. And every once in a while, give your peas a stir. I'm already starting to see some of the caramelization happening, which is a great sign. These are already going to be the sweetest peas you've ever ate since you grew them in your garden. But this little bit of heat is going to activate that sugar even further. And these guys are going to be so good. And now that we have some color going, I'm going to go in with some minced garlic, fresh cracked pepper. I also went ahead and picked some of the dill that I had in my garden right now, and we're going to mince that up as well. And in under five minutes, we're already done. And now for that first bite. It's so incredibly good. You guys are going to absolutely love this. Thank you guys for watching. Good luck in the garden. Keep on growing. And if you want more seed to harvest guides, check out the link right over here.