Saving Sugar Snap Pea Seeds for Next Year

Life has a way of getting in the way, busyness and spontaneous happenings are constantly setting your priorities.  Lots of times planning goes out the window and instead of proactive planning, you find yourself reacting to the daily rigors that rise to the top of the to do list.  It is kind of like a real-life "Whack-A-Mole" game where you hit down things that pop up.

Planning ahead is important - especially in gardening.  The photo below looks like an unkempt, unsightly mess.  And it is.  But it is much more than that.  It is next year's Sugar Snap Pea Crop.  How can that be?  Let's look closer.

Over the winter months, we've harvested the peas many, many times and have eaten a bunch of them and also blanched and frozen a bunch for eating later.  As the weather warms, sugar snap peas wilt and the vines on the trellis quickly turn brown and die.  Once the pea pods get large and tough, we stop harvesting them and let the biggest ones mature on the vine.  You can see a few below:

The trellis for peas must be torn down and moved to make room for spring and summer crops.  First, we'll pull the dried pea pods off the vine.

The peas inside are plump and large.  They are perfect seeds for next year.  Since these are not hybrid, and they are open-pollinated, these perfect peas will make up the seeds I plant later this fall.

I'm looking forward about five or six months ahead when it is time to plant more peas.  But first, I need to make sure these peas are dried fully.

I will keep them on the window sill out of the humidity and allow them to dry. 

Once the peas are dried and stable, I'll pack them into old vitamin and supplement containers and store them away in the dark.  They'll sit there until the fall - then we'll plant more.  And the cycle continues.  The best part about it is that the seeds are free!  And I've saved enough of them that I could skip saving seeds next year and have plenty for planting from the next year's crop.  It's great when a plan works out.