The Race Is on for the First Pea

Reader Contribution by Lee Reich
Published on March 22, 2013
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In some gardening circles, a gardener’s skill is measured by how soon he or she gets the first mess of peas on the table. Snap peas and snow peas, both eaten pods and all, have their places in the garden, but the peas I’m talking about are shelling peas – sometimes called English peas.

I’ll admit to being drawn into this spirit of pea competition, but just as important to me is the quality and quantity of my peas. I don’t grow smooth-seeded shelling peas, such as Alaska, which are earliest but don’t taste as good as wrinkle-seeded types, whose seeds wrinkle up because they are so high in sugars. I also won’t cheat and sow peas indoors in peat pots or flats for transplanting outdoors. Transplanting might give the earliest peas, but you can’t manage enough transplants to get a decent meal because individual plants bear very little and such plants rarely sustain good production. I won’t cheat by growing fungicide-treated seeds, which can be planted earlier without danger of their rotting. Handling poison coated seeds takes the fun out of pea planting and upsets the balance of soil organisms.

Why the big deal about shelling peas? Why not measure our green thumbs with beans? Or lettuces? Or turnips? One reason is that peas are such a quintessential garden delicacy. Sugars in fresh-picked peas start changing to starches just as soon as the pods are picked. Other, less well defined components also contribute to flavor difference that make market and homegrown peas taste like two completely different vegetables.

And there really is a skill in growing a good crop of peas: They respond favorably to good soil – one of the earmarks of good gardeners everywhere – as well as to timely sowing and harvest. Peas are a cool weather crop so must be planted early. Not too early, though, or the seeds might rot. Not too late either, because the plants languish in hot weather, which makes what little flavor the peas can muster pass too quickly.

Too many people have already asked me if I’ve “got my peas in yet,” repeating the traditional advice to get pea seeds into the ground on St. Patrick’s Day. St. Patrick’s Day may be the ideal date in Ireland, but sometime in January is more on the mark in Florida, sometime in May in Minnesota. Here in New York, I plant peas on April 1, which is 7 weeks before the average date of our last killing frost. Some years I’ll push a soil thermometer into the ground to find out if the temperature has yet reached 40 degrees F., the minimum for good pea germination.

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