Plant · P-229

Garden Pea

Lathyrus oleraceus

Garden Pea is a cool-season legume grown for immature pods and seeds - shelling English types plus edible-podded snow and sugar snap types - with a use for nearly every part of the plant, down to the dry seed roasted as a coffee substitute and the shoots eaten as a potherb. It genuinely fixes nitrogen through root nodules, cutting the fertilizer needs of whatever crop follows it, so the real yield is as much soil fertility as food. It is the seasonal opposite of warm-season beans: frost-tolerant but heat-intolerant, sown in late winter for a spring harvest that finishes by late May, or sown in early fall for a crop that ripens into cooling weather instead of racing the heat. It also makes real livestock forage as green chop, silage, or a high-protein seed ration.