Why I’m a pea nut!
Homegrown peas are not only fresher and tastier than frozen ones, says Monty Don – you can also enjoy rarely seen varieties
UNTIL the 20th century, fresh peas were a seasonal luxury. Dried peas were easy to store, high in protein and would make a digestible , cheap, nutritious porridge – mushy peas. But to eat them fresh you either had to grow them yourself or be wealthy, and even then they were only available between June and August.
The freezer has changed all that. Even the most industrially produced frozen pea does not taste bad, so if you are to grow them yourself it makes sense to choose varieties with care and to relish and luxuriate in a freshness that can elude even today’s rapid-freezing process.
For all their ubiquity, peas are quite fussy about how they grow. They thrive when the days are long but cool, and very quickly shrivel up and die when the temperature stays above about 25C for long. Late spring and early summer is their season.
In an ideal world the ground to be used for planting is dug and manured in the autumn, but a thin dressing of quality garden compost just before sowing in spring is almost as good. If you live in a mild area and have well-drained soil then it is worth sowing a row or two in October for an extra early crop. However if, like me, your garden is reliably wet or cold (and usually both) in winter then it is better to sow a batch of peas in pots in February.
Plant the seeds two or three ree to a 7.5cm pot and grow them em with some protection in a cold old frame or cool porch, to plant ant out when the soil warms upp in April. Do not put them aboveve a radiator as it’s not the extrara heat they need but protectionn from sitting in cold soil.
I always sow another batch into the soil at the same time that the mollycoddled ones are planted out – to be harvested about three to four weeks later than the pot-grown ones to provide good succession. A third sowing in mid-May or early June will complete the season, although this latter batch may suffer from heat and drought.
Peas are a legume so they add nitrogen to the soil by extracting it from the air and ‘fixing’ it with nodules on their roots. What the plant does not use remains in the soil – it can be taken up by the crop that follows. This is usually a brassica such as cabbage, whose leaves always benefit from being grown after peas or beans.
As for pea varieties, I like Alderman for its old-fashioned extravagance of height – more than two metres in my rich soil – and flavour. Kelvedon Wonder is very good for small gardens as it is a dwarf variety with a lovely flavour. I also grow Hurst Greenshaft and Carouby de Maussane, which is a flat-podded mangetout variety that has a deliciously buttery texture and taste when cooked.
Mangetout and sugarsnap peas are eaten pods and all. The former never really develop proper peas but retain flat pods, and the latter develop peas slowly, which means that if you don’t pick them regularly you can harvest the maturing peas and eat them as a normal variety. Neither mangetout nor sugarsnap varieties have the hard pod walls of conventional ‘wrinkled’ peas. There is a lot to be said for growing sugarsnap peas if you have limited space and perhaps limited patience for shelling peas.
You can easily save your peas for next year’s seed. To do this, leave the pods on the plant as long as possible and lift the whole plant just before the pods start to split. Either hang the plant up in a dry shed or store the pods on a tray until they split open and the peas can be collected.
Store them in an airtight container or paper bag in a cool, dry place.