My love for growing peas crept up on me slowly. It was the flowers that caught me first
and then the possibilities of pea soup, pea salad and pea and bean guacamole
Last year I saved a whole lot of pea seeds to grow again
I sowed them in egg boxes to avoid the mice
and planted them carefully in different raise beds, with more than usually meticulous labelling to make sure I knew which was which, and prickly sticks to keep the cats off
They’re all growing beautifully now. Here are the ‘Salmon Pink’ with their strange flowers, growing at the top of the plant, looking rather promising
These are ‘Duke of Albany’, a heritage variety that I picked up at a seed swap, growing rather nicely attached to my old seed house frame
The much smaller mange tout ‘Norli’ are looking good
And these peas even have pods developing
The problem is that these last peas are supposed to be Carouby de Mausanne, the one with the beautiful blue butterfly flowers. These flowers are definitely not blue
I realise where I went wrong. I assumed that the beautiful blue seeds that I had saved
were Carouby de Mausanne*. They are probably ‘Prussian Blue’, which has blue seeds but white flowers and beautiful peas. They did very well last year and I must have saved their seeds instead. I’ve made some emergency sowings of my last batch of Carouby de Mausanne in the hope that they will catch up and that I can have some butterfly flowers later in the summer
*postscript – if I had just read my own blog posts I would have realised that they were Prussian Blue. Note to self to check blog before planting in future 🙂
The Carouby de Maussane I grew had white flowers, so maybe that is what you have after all?!
It will be interesting to see!
What a collection! We have to protect ours so rigorously from the sparrows that Mrs T often thinks that growing peas is more trouble than it it worth.
Thanks. Magpies and pigeons are our most frequent birds. The sparrows stay further away because of the cats