Planting Snowpeas

It’s not too early to plant snowpeas a.k.a. sugarpeas a.k.a edible pea pods. In fact, in some regions, some “early birds” planted snowpeas in the fall and left it up to the seeds as to when they felt ready to sprout. I normally plant snowpeas in February on the Central Coast. But this winter, I was too busy watching the rain fall and pine trees tumble to get around to it.

This year I planted a variety that was found to be a heavy producer called ‘Mammoth Melting Sugar’ that I read about in Organic Gardening Magazine . The sprouting experiment that I described in my post on testing the germination rate of seeds (click here) showed that the ten snowpeas I tested were all fertile and sprouted in a damp paper towel. I obviously had nothing to worry about if I prepared the beds and planted properly. I planted these sprouting seeds, along with the rest of the packet of seeds, and few I had saved from last year, after soaking the seeds in water for 24 hours.

I prepared a five-foot bed with two rows of wire for the vines to climb. I added a bag of composted steer manure and some fresh worm compost from my bins and worked it into the bed. I made four trenches an inch deep and placed the seeds, about four inches apart,  into them, covering them with soil. I patted the earth gently, then watered.

Here is a picture of the finished bed. If the quail don’t snip off the tender sprouts and the opossum (that has developed a taste for sprouts) doesn’t unearth them, we’ll have more than enough snowpeas (sugarpeas) for salads and stir-fry this summer.