Growing Peas Q +A
Sugar snap peas on a tri-pod trellis.
We often quote our book “Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard” and say that fresh snap peas are a reason unto themselves for having your own garden. I’ve never eaten a pea that has tasted as good as the ones I grow in my home garden and I want to you have the same experience. I’ve created this post to help answer your pea-growing questions and set you up for success!
After reading the Q+A section of this post, if you still have questions about growing peas, or just want to learn more, scroll down to the bottom where you’ll see links to older blogs and podcast episodes we’ve created on the topic!
Pea Q & A
As with our previous post, the following questions are commons inquiries that we’ve been receiving from our followers on Instagram:
To keep the Q & A as simple as possible, I’m using the following guidelines:
This blog addresses snap and shelling peas (aka. edible peas. Sweet peas are a different beast).
Peas fall into two general categories. Shell peas are typically grown to maturity on the vine and then the shell is removed before eating. Snap peas are harvested before they are fully mature on the vine and usually eaten whole with the shell on.
The questions on planting timing were specific to the Pacific Northwest, so I’ll address them within that context. Broadly speaking, peas mature* in about 58 days and are a cool-weather crop.
*see last question in post!
Q: How close together can you seed/transplant snap, snow and shelling peas?
A: Pea plants should be spaced 1-2 inches apart. Peas can grow well when spaced close together, so don’t be afraid to pack them in a little. If you do plant them this close together, space rows several feet apart. Over-planting reduces air circulation and makes your plants more susceptible to mildew.
Q: When can you plant peas in the PNW?
A: You can set out transplants as early as late February and as late as mid-May. Direct-seed peas mid-March through late April. They don’t germinate or grow well when temperatures get above 75°F, so it’s best to sow them early!
Technically, you can also try planting peas for fall harvest by direct-seeding them in early to mid-July. We’ve found that this technique can be tricky for many home gardeners for a few reasons:
Mid-July tends to be when gardens are the fullest, so there often isn’t space to plant a second round of peas.
The plants are too heat stressed to produce a good fruit set.
Q: Should you direct-seed or transplant peas?
A: Both work well!
We tend to transplant peas because birds and slugs love newly buried pea seeds and tiny pea sprouts. We find that transplanted peas are more resistant to this type of damage. We visit the majority of our gardens on an every-other week basis. This means that if we direct-seeded peas in a garden and the new sprouts were munched by a bird, it would be a week or two before we noticed and could replant again. As the season progresses and the weather starts to warm up, the window for planting peas closes, so we want to get them established as early as possible to ensure an extended pea harvest.
If you’re a home gardener and want to direct seed, just keep an eye on your plants! The direct-seeded peas usually germinate within a week. If you notice that your new sprouts are getting mowed down by slugs or birds, just reseed as soon as possible. If your seed doesn’t germinate at all, or germination is spotty, gently dig around your seeded row and see if the seed is still there. Crows and other birds love eating them whole. You can fill in a spotty row with new seeds and the later-planted ones often catch up with the original row.
If you are having pest issues, sprinkle your planting with iron phosphate (to keep the slugs at bay) and drape some bird netting over your bed. After your peas have grown to about 3 inches in height, gently remove the bird netting. Be sure not to break any of the growing tips on your pea plants as you do this. If you forget to remove your bird netting, your plants will start to get caught in the netting and you’ll have created a new issue for yourself to negotiate. :)
A note on timing: If sown early enough (in the PNW, sometime in March), direct seeded peas tend to catch up with transplanted peas once it comes time to start producing.
Tomatoes (left) and snow peas growing together in a Seattle garden in mid June.
Q: Peas only take 58 days to mature, so if I plant them now (in early March), I can pull them and plant my tomatoes in their place in early May, right?
A: Not so much.
This is a popular misconception that many gardeners have and it all comes down to two things:
What I refer to as the “quality of the growing day”. To put it simply, not all growing days are created equally. Early spring days and early fall days may technically be part of your growing season, but plants are going to grow much more slowly in these cooler and shorter days then they will during the long, warm days of summer. This means that even though peas need to be started while the soil temperature is still cool, they won’t really get going until things warm up a bit.
Fruiting crops vs. bulbing, flowering or leaf crops. Peas are a fruiting crop, which generally means that they will produce many fruits over an extended period of time, as opposed to a head of lettuce, which is one done and ready to harvest for a short period of time. Your peas might START producing after 58 days in the ground, but that doesn’t mean you want to pick the first 10 peas and call it a season. You want those plants to continue producing as long as possible. After all, you’ve waited 58 days and probably dedicated some valuable garden space to the plants.
We tend to pull March-planted peas from gardens in mid-July, or closer to 110-120 days after planting. At this point in the season the heat is starting to get to the peas and they get powdery mildew. By this point we’ve harvested pounds and pounds of fruit off of the hard-working plants over an extended period of time.
Since we generally plant tomatoes in mid-May, there are actually 2 months of overlap when both peas and tomatoes are in the garden.
We often quote our book “Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard” and say that fresh snap peas are a reason unto themselves for having your own garden. I’ve never eaten a pea that has tasted as good as the ones I grow in my home garden.