Today, we're going to learn how
to grow a classic spring crop. And that would be peas. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening
where we're growing greener thumbs. Let's go! Peas are a quintessential spring crop, one of the easiest and most tasty and
pleasurable things that you can grow in spring. So in today's video, I'm going to go through the
major categories of peas. Cause there are a couple of different
types that you want to consider some sowing and planting recommendations.
Of course, some care and trellising. And at the end of the video, I will
show you my favorite way to eat peas. Spoiler alert. It really, doesn't have
anything to do with going in the kitchen. So cultivate that like button
and I will bless you with 55 more pea pods than you would have had this
season. And let's get into the video. Peas are one of the oldest
cultivated crops in the world, and they're a staple in many areas
of the world, including here. I mean, in North America, we grow them
all the time. They're fantastic. I know a lot of my British gardeners
love to grow peas and they have their own unique methods. The thing that's nice
about peas is that they can tolerate cold, even light frost. And they're okay having
what we call "wet feet" in the garden, which means that they're okay if
the soil is a little overly moist. That makes them perfect as a spring crop
because you're going to get those cold temperatures. And also,
unless you live here, you're probably going to
get a decent amount of rain. If you can manage your temperatures
and keep the temps low in the summer, by using shade or planting in an
area that's a little bit cooler, you can actually grow peas all the way
through into fall until the winter kills them off. So you would in
theory can grow them year round. But at least for me
here in my warmer zone, I'm going to grow them right
now in the beginning of spring. And I'm also going to restart
them again in late fall. So I can get a winter crop. The thing you want to know before you
even start growing and planting your peas, which we'll get to in a second is
what type of pea should you grow? The three major types of peas are
shelling peas, snap, peas, and snow peas. And then you also have sweet peas, which
are typically grown for the flowers. You don't want to eat those.
And then you have tendril peas, which are going to grow for
these tendrils and shoots. And you're not really
consuming them for the pea pod. Let's talk about those three
main categories though. First you've got your snow peas. Your snow peas you're
going to eat the whole pod. The seeds inside those pea seeds are
immature. They're underdeveloped. And the seed pod itself is translucent. So you just pull one off and pop it
in your mouth. Very delicious. Next, you have your shelling peas
sometimes called English peas. The pods on these are a lot more
fibrous. They'll have a string in them. And typically what you do is take the
shell off, hence the name shelling. And you consume the peas after that,
just eating the peas themselves. Then you've got your snap peas.
There are cross of shelling and snow, which means you get the best of both
worlds. You can eat the whole pod, but you also have that nice
sweetness in the pea itself. Finally, as far as varieties go, there
are a lot of different types. You can get a dwarf or bushing style
peas like the Desiree Dwarf Blauwshokker pea, a classic and a favorite of mine, or you can get more classic ones
that will run all the way up, like a six to seven foot tall structure. I'll leave a few varieties in the upper
corner as we talk throughout this video that you can try out, but now let's get into how to
actually sow and start your pea seeds. So here I have some little snow pea
white peas. Of course there are snow pea, 30 day crops, 40 inches tall. And I know we've probably
all seen these before, but I figured I would just show you
really quickly what they look like. These are the dried out pea
seeds. A lot of people will say, you should soak these
to improve germination. It can definitely speed it up
and you don't have to do it. That's the thing to remember.
You don't have to do it. So if you're going to transplant, what you'll want to do is just
pop a little hole in here. These are the Epic Six
Cell trays here. So pop, I usually put two in about an inch
or so down there you go and cover it up and you're good to go. You just have to wait water it in same
sort of seed starting process as normal. So if you do opt to start your seeds
indoors for spacing or timing reasons, then you just pop them out
and transplant them in. And you're totally good to go.
But if you're like many gardeners, including myself, you may just want
to make your life a little bit easier, take your pea seeds and then
just direct sow them in the bed. That's what we did right
here on this little trellis. And as far as spacing goes, you actually
can be quite aggressive with this. You can put, I mean, I think we put
somewhere around 40 just right here. So you can plant them anywhere
from one to three inches apart. You could plant them
right next to each other. You can have more than one pea
plant coming out of the same hole, as long as you don't go
absolutely overkill they're quite forgiving because
you gotta think about it. They're actually putting a lot of
their growth upwards and the roots are relatively shallow. And don't seem to
mind competing with one another too, too much. So general rule of thumb, you can direct sow an inch deep cover
them up, make sure they're watered in. You've got a nice seed hull to
soak through. And after that, you'll start to see them
come up. And at this point, you really want to make sure the watering
is on point cause they're a shallow rooted plant. They're not going to do really well
with like a very heavy clay soil. And they're not going to do really
well if you let them dry out, especially early on, you'll
get like yellowing down there. And it just seems to be a bit of an issue. Another thing I've noticed
is if you transplant, you can have a little bit more of an
issue with the roots making themselves at home and really getting a lot of
nitrogen out of that soil early on. That's another reason why I usually
prefer to direct sow my peas. One final planting method
you really might enjoy. If you're looking to plan a big old
line of peas is to put them in a rain gutter. So fill the rain
gutter up with some soil, sow your peas in a trench in
that, and then once they sprout, you can just furrow and drop
it directly into that furrow. I've seen this happen, uh, typically
with the British gardeners. I don't know, maybe it's got popular over
in, in the UK for awhile, but I know Huw Richards over
at Huw's Nursery does this. It's a really cool method and it's
highly efficient. As far as times, you don't have to prick them
all out and plop them in, although you of course could direct
sow. Now, as far as care goes, we already talked about
watering, it's shallow rooted. You want to make sure
you keep that in mind, but you also want to give this maybe
six ish plus hours of sun a day, as long as the temperatures
stay relatively cool. Remember it's a quintessential
spring fall crop. So if the temperatures get too too hot, I would say above maybe
80 degrees Fahrenheit, we'll put Celsius up here as well. Then the pea production
will start to terminate. So the flowers won't form
or won't form as well. And the pods won't form
or won't form as well. So you do want to keep those temperatures
a little bit lower if you can. Fertility wise, I've never
really fertilized my peas.
Remember they're a legume, they're a nitrogen fixing crop.
So at some point in their growth, they're going to start
producing their own nitrogen. The one thing that I will say, and a lot of people recommend I've done
it and I've also not done this and my results have been more or less the same. And that would be using a bacterial
inoculant when you're transplanting or in your pea soil. The reason why is because they're only
nitrogen fixing if the bacteria that partner up with the nodules on
the roots are actually present. And so the logic there is if you
inoculate with that bacteria, then those rhizobacteria, which is what they're called will actually
start to be present and start fixing the nitrogen at a faster rate. I
really don't know because like I said, I've done it both ways and my
peas have been fine both ways. So maybe my soil already has
a lot of rhizobacteria in it, or maybe the inoculant is doing something
and I just haven't been able to really measure that. But it is
something to consider. One of the most important parts of growing
peas successfully is providing them some sort of structure upon which they
can climb. So I have this honestly, a little weird looking because there's
kale growing through it right now. I'm going to harvest the kale out pretty
soon. This is just a bamboo trellis. So the bamboo stakes cost maybe $5 for
a pack of 10 or 15 at the local nursery. That's relatively inexpensive. And
then up top, it's just some twine. The reason why this works is because
peas have a tendril, that'll go out. And as soon as it hits something
solid, it starts to wrap around it. And that's how it supports
itself as it climbs upwards. So as long as you're giving it
something it can do that to, the trellising method
doesn't really matter, but I'll show you three
really quick ones here. So of course you have this one
here, the bamboo twine one, you're just using some lashing up top. And I've covered that in a couple
of different videos before. If you want to see a full video though,
let me know. I will make it for you, but let's take a look
at another simple one. So this trellis here is actually the
backside of one that I showed you guys earlier in the video. This is just a broken piece of
a Gardener's Vertex tomato cage. I accidentally broke it. I decided I
could stab it into the ground flat. Then we have a lot of wind coming through
in this direction, coming in this way. And so we stuck some bamboo stakes in
here just as a backstop so that this doesn't blow like crazy against
the wind. So for a while, it was actually pulling all the way
back and it wasn't really great. So this is just a fantastic way to
slot in peas on the edge of a bed. And this is on the north side of the bed
so that it's not shading anything out. Finally, we have more of an
obelisk style trellis here. This one is coming out of a
company called Terra Sculpture. I'll put it in the description,
but as you can see, the peas eventually make their way up. The tendrils are attaching to this little
wire right here and they're staying with the structure. Otherwise
they would just be flopping. All these tendrils would be getting
attached to each other and getting all, and the production has
been really, really great. And it kind of makes this nice natural
look as it covers the trellis in green. When you're growing peas, you may run
into some pest and disease issues. I wouldn't say they're really
super disease or pest prone. On a disease perspective,
you might get powdery mildew. You might get fusarium wilt,
or you might get mosaic virus. I would say powdery mildew
is probably your most common. That's the most common in general. It
seems like it's hard to avoid. I mean, keep the conditions relatively cool.
Make sure there's good air flow. Make sure that you're not watering over
the top of your peas and you should be fine. As far as pests go. You're probably going to get a little
bit of aphid pressure. If anything else, I haven't seen a whole
lot in my pea crops, either at this garden
or gardens in the past, you can blast them off in the beginning
of the day with some cold water that tends to do the trick. I really haven't
seen a whole lot of pest issues though. So you've gotten through the
beginning of your peas' life, you've avoided some pests and disease. How do you know when it's
time to harvest your peas? It really depends on the variety. So thinking back to the beginning of
the video, if you have those snow peas, that's going to be your earliest harvest
because you're harvesting them at the immature pod stage somewhere
around 40 to 50 days. Or so if you're harvesting
a shelling [ea. It's going to be 60, 70 days and you're
going to want to make sure that it's
nice and plump it's ready to go. They're fully formed. My personal
favorite pea though is a snap pea. So let's go out into the front
yard. I'll show you how I like to eat my
peas. So we're back out in the front yard.
These are the peas that I like to eat.
This is the phase that I like to eat them
at. And what I like to do instead of just
ripping it off like this, where you can
pull the entire plant and potentially rip
a stem or damage it, just hold here and
pull here. Then you're in a good spot.
I accidentally missed the little flower
there, but it doesn't really matter because the way I eat this pea is quite simple.
I like to pop it open like this and look
at that. That's the exact phase that I
like to eat them. They're not all the way
fully formed, but they're not super young.
So it's right at this phase. So let's
do one more right here, just because. There you go. I want to show
you that perfect pea phase. The sweetness on this. I swear
guys. It is unreal. Unreal. So there you go. It looks like
we had a, oops. I lost one. We had a mishap right there. We lost
this one. We lost that one, but whatever, these are still good. So let's go ahead
and taste test. Actually. There you go. I finally got a nice looking
one. Look at those bad boys. So here we have a couple of these peas.
Let's give em a little taste test. It's so sweet. I'll tell you what. You eat em like this, there's almost no point in bringing
them indoors. There's really no point. Look at this just pop them in. They're so good sweetness
is insane and they're so prolific that you can come
out every single time. It's like a good incentive to come out
in the garden and do a lot of your garden chores because you just pop some peas
in your mouth. And you're good to go. If you do want to see a little bit more
on actually preparing food inside the home, check out my second
channel, Epic Homesteading, where I go into a lot of the more
homesteady type of stuff, energy systems, recipes, we're getting chickens soon, all that kind of stuff is over on Epic
Homesteading, but I hope this was a good, informative guide on growing
peas. It's a really fun crop, really easy for a beginner gardener,
tons of different varieties. So I highly recommend you give
it a shot and until next time, good luck in the garden
and keep on growing. Right.
