It's tempting to snap pods off with your fingers, but you risk breaking the vine, which is a total bummer. Start at the base of the pea plant and work your way up as you look for pods ready to be enjoyed. To harvest sugar snaps, wipe a pair of pruners down with some rubbing alcohol and grab a bowl. Waiting too long gives the sugars inside the pod more time to turn into starch, which can eventually make the pod inedible. Pods are sweetest when they're still green and tender, before the peas inside have swelled up enough to really press against the sides of the shell. During the peak of your plants' production, you might even want to come out every day to harvest. The more your vine has to support developed pea pods, the less energy it has to produce new ones. You might love the way your vines look dripping with pods, but it's best to keep your vines picked. Keep two words in mind when it comes to harvesting your snap peas: early and often. There are a lot of great growers out there who are following sustainable practices for peas.

If you do buy peas from the store, prioritize buying organic, or skip the produce aisle and head to your local farmers' market instead. Peas rank high on the 'Dirty Dozen'īoth imported and domestic sugar snap peas rank on the Environmental Working Group's 'Dirty Dozen', the list of foods most likely to contain serious pesticide residue on them. They're ground-up garden peas baked into a pea shape.

By the way, you know those bags of Harvest Snaps at the grocery store? They're one of my favorite healthy-ish snacks, but they actually aren't made from snap peas at all. When you grow your own, you can enjoy the entire plant, pea shoots and all.

When I can find fresh peas at the store, I've noticed they've become increasingly pricey-and that's just for the pod. Why buy peas that have been trucked all the way from Washington, Montana, or North Dakota (our three largest producers), when you can have your own right in your backyard for very little work? Fresh peas are expensive But did you know that only 5 percent of peas grown in the entire United States are sold fresh? That's because peas don't store well for very long, so the easiest way to get them to the customer is frozen or canned. There are few things more delicious from the garden than that first bite into a sugar snap pea fresh from the vine. In fact, sugar snaps are often considered the most flavorful variety of pea.ģ Reasons to Grow Your Own Sugar Snap Peas It's hard to buy fresh peas Sugar snaps are tender yet crisp just like snow peas, but they have a sweet flavor profile thanks to that cross with the garden pea. Sugar snaps are more rounded and juicier than snow peas (pictured below), and you don't have to worry about shelling them to enjoy them. I'd like to thank him for his contribution to gardening because sugar snaps are some of my favorite veggies ever. Lamborn developed all kinds of varieties of sugar snaps, including two that are stringless, but the original is still the most popular. He crossed the two, and- Ta da!-the sugar snap pea was born. Calvin Lamborn decided he wanted the sweetness of the garden pea but the mange tout quality of the snow pea. Mange tout, French for 'eat all' peas do not need to be shelled since their seeds are still tender and sweet and since their fibers grow in only one direction. Snow peas are so named because they can withstand frost and snow, and unlike garden peas, the entire pod is edible. That's because they're typically harvested before the peas have fully developed in the pod. These are very small peas that come packaged in an almost-flat pod. The garden peas known as English peas are typically what you find inside of canned peas at the store. These are sweet little peas that grow inside tough outer shells that must be discarded before eating. To properly introduce you to sugar snaps, let me first tell you a little about the two peas that combined to create them.įirst, there are traditional garden peas.

Sugar snap peas growing