How to grow peas and best varieties

Peas are easy to grow from seed for delicious summer crops. You can even eat the shoots in stir fries.

The Which? Gardening magazine research team have grown a wide range of varieties and tasted them all to bring you the best varieties to grow in your garden.

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How to grow peas: month by month

Best pea varieties

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Sugarsnap peas

Mangetout peas

Garden peas

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When to sow 

Sow in modules or rootrainers, from March to June, using a Best Buy compost for sowing seeds. Or sow outdoors, 4cm deep and 5cm apart from April onwards. For continuous crops, make several sowings, each a few weeks apart, up to June.

Try a Best Buy pop up greenhouse

What is the difference between mangetout and sugarsnap peas?

Mangetout is French for ‘eat all’, so you might think this could refer to both mangetout and sugar snaps. However, mangetout are flat pods of peas that have yet to develop. Confusingly they are also known as snow peas or sugar peas. Sugarsnaps, meanwhile, have thicker pods that are juicier, rounded and slightly curved.

Growing for pea shoots

If you just want to eat the crunchy leaf shoots in stir fries and salads, sow peas in module trays as early as February. Then plant outside and once they have grown about 30cm tall, pinch out the shoots – which will encourage ones lower down to grow and replace them. They can be cropped like this for several months.

Caring for your plants

Planting

Erect supports either before or soon after planting. Pea netting, with its wide mesh, can be strung between poles. Twiggy sticks also make a good support, either in a row or as a wigwam. Plant out module plants from April onwards, 10cm apart in staggered rows. 

Help your plants with a recommended soil improver

Watering 

Water regularly, particularly once the plants start to flower. Keep the area weed free, but avoid weeding too close to the base of the roots, as this can cause damage and allow pea wilt to enter. If you have a fertile soil, you shouldn’t need to feed. On poor soil, water on a tomato feed every two weeks.

Discover our Best Buy watering cans

How and when to harvest

Harvest in: June to October

Hold the plant and snap off the peas. Harvest regularly to avoid the peas becoming large, tough and stringy.

Common growing problems

Mice

Mice love pea seeds, so sow them in modules under cover. 

Birds

Birds peck out seedlings and tear the leaves, so cover with netting. 

Read more about birds.

Powdery mildew

Powdery mildew affects pea plants in dry weather. There are no fungicides for use on edible crops, so water regularly and avoid growing peas during the hottest summer months. 

Read more about powdery mildew.

Pea wilt

Pea wilt, a form of fusarium, causes the plants to blanch, wilt and die back. You need to remove affected plants when the problem appears.

Pea moth

Pale-yellow caterpillars 9mm long with black heads and brown dots feed on peas inside the pods. Usually only a few peas in each pod are affected as there are rarely more than two caterpillars per pod, and each caterpillar needs only one or two peas to feed on. By sorting, you can still save much of the crop.

The moths spend the winter in cocoons in soil where peas were grown last year and in nearby rough ground and rubbish heaps. They come out in late May and June and are active all summer. During June and July they lay their flattened, tiny eggs in twos and threes on leaves and around flowers. These hatch in about eight days. The tiny caterpillars make their way to the pods and tunnel inside. It takes about three weeks for them to mature, after which they cut their way out and fall to the ground. Before pupating, they burrow into the soil and form cocoons, in which to spend the winter. In spring they leave the cocoons and come closer to the surface, where they weave other cocoons in which to pupate. They leave as adult moths.

The best to avoid pea moth is to sow at the right time. When peas flower before mid-June they escape attack, as pods are past the vulnerable stage by the time the moth is flying. Sowing in October and November under cloches, or in pots or gutters indoors in January and February, outdoors until mid-March, will avoid the moth. You’ll need to use a fast-growing early variety such as 'Feltham First', 'Meteor' or 'Douce Provence'. Early sowings outdoors can rot in the ground. Cover the sowings with fleece to help survival. Sowings after the middle of May will be in flower too late for the moth to infest them. Since these late peas can get mildew, look for a mildew-resistant variety. 

Pea and bean weevil

The adults of this pest make characteristic U-shaped notching all round the leaf edges in spring. Although they do spread viral diseases, they do not usually do significant damage in the garden unless very young plants are attacked. Usually, however, the plants will grow out of the vulnerable stage with little loss of crop. The larvae feed on the roots of the plant and are only noticeable when the crop is pulled up. They are small (up to 5mm long) white grubs with no legs and brown heads, that look very like vine-weevil grubs. They can sometimes be seen feeding on the nitrogen-fixing nodules.

To avoid attack, prepare the soil well, making a fine tilth. If the soil is poor, boost the seedlings' growth before sowing by adding extra fertiliser, such as growmore (rake in 70g a sq m). Water the young plants if necessary to keep them growing steadily and cover them with garden fleece in cold weather. Covering before the seedlings emerge will exclude not only pea and bean weevil, but also blackfly and birds too. Keeping the rows well hoed will also reduce the chances of damage. There is no realistic physical way of controlling the root-eating larvae. There are no chemical controls available for adults or larvae. An alternative is to start broad beans off in pots to plant out when large enough to avoid serious damage.

How we test peas

We chose widely available varieties of mangetout, sugar snap, and garden or shelling peas. In April, we sowed our peas in rootrainer modules and kept them in a heated greenhouse until they germinated. We then hardened them off in the coldframe. Our trial bed was in a sunny spot with free-draining soil. In May, we erected posts two metres apart and attached pea netting to support the plants. We enclosed the bed in a fruit cage to stop the birds eating the seedlings. We planted around 30 plants of each variety, in staggered rows, 10cm apart either side of the netting, and watered them in well. We fed the peas every two weeks with a tomato feed once they started to crop and watered regularly, changing to a foliar feed later in the season. Many of the varieties developed powdery mildew, and pea wilt also affected some of them. We removed individual plants when the mildew and pea wilt started to affect growth and cropping. We harvested the peas twice a week, making sure we picked the pods before they got too large. We weighed them and recorded the health of the plants. We then tasted them raw and cooked.