Notes from Mr Fluttergrub’s garden.
While once a staple on every plot, many smaller scale growers and home gardeners seem to have given up on podding peas. Frozen has ousted fresh. Most peas now come in a packet rather than a pod. If you’ve lived a life sheltered from real veg you may even be puzzled by talk of ‘podding’ peas. Should that be the case let’s be clear: podding peas, often termed ‘garden’ peas, are those that need to be removed from their pods, or ‘shucked’ as my allotmenteering ancestors would have put it, before eating. Unlike mangetout or sugar snaps, probably more widely grown on many plots than garden peas nowadays, the pods themselves are not palatable. It’s the inside contents that are for eating; the casing is for the compost heap.
There are lots of reasons podding peas are now less commonly grown. An obvious one is the convenience of frozen; just pour from the pack with no need to pod. But it’s also fair to say that podding peas don’t always compare well with frozen in taste and texture. Picked at perfection, podding peas are a treat that surpass processed in flavour and freshness but left on the plant too long, or not eaten soon after picking, taste and texture can disappoint. Here the processors can have an edge. Agribusiness peas, bred to pod in one flush for machine-harvesting in a single pass, can be rapidly frozen. This provides a standardised and consistent product. There’s no risk of ‘bullet’ peas from pods that escaped the hand picker.
Another reason many gardeners shun podding peas is the time and effort it takes to grow a worthwhile crop. A lot of pea plants are needed to get a useful harvest. Although it will differ according to variety, an average number of pods per pea plant is probably around six. Even if all the pods are full, many will have no more than eight peas inside. That’s less than 50 peas per plant, fewer than an average plate portion. Then there’s support. Peas have tendrils and want to cling. True, some modern varieties developed for field scale production are partly self-supporting, but most garden types really need something on which to climb. Traditionally this would have been pea ‘sticks’, often twiggy hazel cuttings. In practice most gardeners now use netting strung between posts. This is not only more readily obtainable and practical but, especially if wire, offers some protection from the various ‘predators’ partial to peas. Except where peas are not grown in-mass on a field scale, wood pigeons are likely to strip the leaves from plants. Sparrows can also nibble seedlings and rodents will steal newly sown seed. Then there are insect pests. Tissue piercing thrips suck the foliage, distorting plants and pods. Less prevalent, but also less obvious until pods are shelled, is damage inflicted by the pea moth. It’s caterpillars feed on the developing peas within pods, reducing the number, leaving frass (excrement) and giving an unpleasant surprise to the unfortunate ‘shucker’.
Despite all these problems I do have peas on the plot. While I cultivate some mangetouts it’s the podding type that make up most of the crop. The aim is to be able to pick fresh prime condition pods from late June through to August. This means making four to five sowings directly into the ground in rows. The first batch is started in late March if the soil is warm and dry enough and the last batch towards the end of May. Seed, that’s dried peas if you never grown peas before, is sown in a shallow spade wide long scoop or mini-trench of five-centimetre depth in a grid pattern about four to five centimetres apart. Once seedlings break the surface, I erect a rabbit wire support to one side with plastic net stretched from it to form a ‘half-tent’ shape. This is essential to fend off pea plundering wood pigeons. As the plants grow many will cling to the netting. With some taller varieties twine strung along the unwired side is also needed to prevent plants sprawling. All being well, and depending on variety and weather, pods plump enough to pick should be ready between 12 and 14 weeks after sowing.
When it comes to varieties I mainly stick to the older, heirloom types. For the first sowing Douce Provence is the usual choice. This is a round-seeded variety. Most garden peas are wrinkle seeded (that is the pea seed is not smooth). These are slightly less hardy, and therefore more susceptible to rotting if sown in damp and cool conditions, than their round seeded cousins. For the next batch I usually go for Kelvedon Wonder, a relatively short growing variety. For subsequent, or ‘maincrop’ sowings, it’s mainly Hurst Green Shaft. This variety, which can reach about a metre tall, dates to the late nineteenth century. In my experience, having grown numerous other varieties, it remains the best maincrop podding pea available. Often yielding ten peas to a pod, if picked regularly it is sweet and succulent, better than any peas you can buy in a frozen pack.
It’ll be a month or more before the Hurst Green Shaft are ready; mid-July is when the first batch is usually pickable. This year germination has been somewhat patchy, not helped by the exceptionally dry weather during much of mid and late spring that inhibited the establishment of most direct sown crops. Fortunately, the earlier sowings, especially Douce Provence, benefited from the still moist and warmer than normal conditions of late March and look set to yield good crops. The first pods will be full in a week or so. With luck we’ll then have enough pods to pick from mid-June to mid-August. Sweet and succulent, these are a summer treat.
Growing may be a bit of a palaver, but I won’t be giving up on podding peas!
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