Easy Peasy - Pea shoots

 I wonder just what will be the food of the moment this year. It's not about food fads, it's about vogue, I think. Remember when Delia Smith put cranberries on every one's shopping lists here in the UK several Christmases ago? Then along came rocket, blue berries and  the renaissance of water cress. Last year it was pea shoots. Supermarkets were stocking little packs of these, all the TV chefs were talking about ways of using these and food magazines had recipes for salads using them. If your only experience of green peas entails taking a pack out of the freezer then you will not know the pleasure of munching fresh peas as you pod them and will have missed the flavour that pea shoots deliver. It is just so easy and cheap to grow them there really is no need to miss out on this.

 It was Alys Fowler on her series The Edible Garden who showed me how easy this would be to do and got me started on this.  As the series is no longer on the BBC's i-Player, and I am not sure if it is in the book, this is how easy it is.

 You need 

• some multi-purpose compost 
• a tray 
• the pea seeds 
• an old  plastic bag.   

 The tray can be a seed tray or it can be any plastic tray about 5 cm deep or deeper. It needs to have drainage holes so punch some in the base of the tray with something sharply pointed. I used a plastic tray that had  a bulk buy of steak mince in for the first crop of the year.

As for the pea seeds, you could get these from a garden centre but it is much cheaper to pick them up from the dried pulses aisle in the supermarket. One of the reasons  that I decided to have a go was seeing that Alys took her seeds  from a packet identical to one I already had in the larder cupboard. They must be whole peas not split peas though.

What to do: 

1. Fill the tray about half full with the compost and firm it down.
2. Spread the seeds evenly over the compost. Because I was doing this batch with a view to taking a picture for this post I started by placing them in careful rows then  I finished the right side of the tray in the way I have always done it in the past; simply scattering them onto the soil and flicking them around so that they are more or less evenly randomly spaced. 

Then you just need to cover the seeds with another layer of compost, a centimetre or so deep. Firm it down and water the tray. Pop the tray into a plastic bag, an old carrier bag will do and tuck the bag under the tray. This will keep the moisture in and the cold and certain uninvited diners out. It doesn't need to be kept indoors at this stage of the year.
After a few days you should see signs of germination and when all the seeds, or almost all, have shot, remove the bag and water the shoots every couple of days. Once they are 4 or 5 cm high,  you can start harvesting by nipping the shoots off just above a couple of leaves. I have just started picking the tray in the first picture about three or four weeks after I planted them. Keeping them watered, they will keep growing but it is a good time to get another batch started.

 Add them to salads, stir fries, risottos; both the leaves and the tendrils are tender and delicious. I like to mix them with the leaves from my 'cut and come again' salad mix and of course I have rocket started in my improvised propagator.

Why bother? Well for a start they are no bother and they are tasty and very nutritious apparently and all the more so if they have a short journey from your seed tray to your plate.

So thanks, Alys.  There is a little clip of her demonstrating planting micro-veg here. Once you have started small scale food crops, who knows where it might lead.