Pea Shoots

Although I grow lots of salads on my allotment I like to have some standby salad ingredients at home.

In the autumn, winter and spring I grow various salad leaves in my unheated greenhouse.

These salads include pea shoots, grown from a bag of  marrowfat peas from a wholefood shop (such as Norwich’s Rainbow Wholefoods). Bags of marrowfat peas are cheap and one bag will give you lots of shoots, so the main expense of growing your own is compost.

Pea shoots taste lovely on their own (like fresh peas) and combine well with other salad leaves. Harvest them just before you eat them because they wilt quickly once picked.

Grow pea shoots as follows:

1. Go to a wholefood shop and buy a large packet of marrowfat peas.
2. Plant the seeds in a pot or seed tray of damp, seedling or general purpose peat-free compost, sowing thickly. Cover with half an inch of compost.
3. Wait until the pea shoots have grown their first sets of leaves and tendrils, then snip off the tender shoots.
4. Repeat step 3 several times, to get more than one crop. Keep the peas well watered and in a fairly cool place. I stop growing them in summer when there are lots of other things to eat and my greenhouse is too hot (and full of tomato and pepper plants).
5. Keep sowing for a continuous supply of pea shoots.

See this excellent post on growing pea shoots. The peashoots.com website has a whole host of recipes for pea shoots.