YJL

To be honest, I didn’t even believe this is possible, growing peas from store-bought peas, but I got one successful germination:

I’ve watched quite some videos about how to save pea seeds on YouTube and all of them are home growing peas. You need to let the peas mature and dry on vine on their own, or at least wait until when they look big enough and bring to dry place to air dry if weather is going to get wet.

So, on 10/22, I took five sugar snaps peas, I believe they were, after tried to plant fresh peas straight from the pod into soil, which didn’t work. That’s why I decided to give it a try: drying the store-bought peas, which I honestly wouldn’t give any hope at all.

At the time, I thought even this didn’t work, I’d just throw everything into compost and doesn’t even need to worry about putting seeds into pile since they wouldn’t germinate. So, the journey began, Operation DryBay commenced:

I used a computer fan, attached five pea pods onto a string for a week. But it’s getting too slow, so I moved them near a heat source. Also added five snow peas as additional to the operation. The fan blew warm air around the surfaces of the pods, another week later, I had dry pods:

They were as dry as I saw in those videos, only the seeds didn’t look very same. Although I don’t know what viable seeds actually look like, image search engine didn’t actually help, but most of those images didn’t have so many wrinkles on the dry seeds.

By the way, I think the left ones are sugar snap, right ones are snow peas, but ain’t 100% sure. Anyway, four days ago, I used the typical wet paper towel method to germinate the seeds. Two days ago, I noticed one was germinating, and this was what they looked like today:

Basically, only that one—bottom left—was a success, although a couple of peas seem still have a chance, so I am keeping them on the paper after I transplanted that one into soil.

Here are a couple of close-ups:

They are about 3mm to 6 or 7mm across.

If you open up the original image of first picture, you can actually see some black spots, I think those are molds and they are actually not on the seed surface, there are some barely visible strings. I guess my paper towel was too wet or my germination environment wasn’t quite comfortable.

I was drying some green beans at the same time¹, store-bought as well, and I have good faith in them, not actually thought that was possible before I opened a pod, I am sure some bean seeds would germinate for sure. You would believe after you see the bean seeds I got from drying. But you would have to wait to see the result in a few days, just put them onto paper towel.

Actually, I am having more beans in brown paper bag, placed in warm place, I thought I needed to try that, but now I didn’t believe so. Just air dry should be enough. However, there is another vegetable in with those beans, but that one really needs a miracle, but we will see.

Anyway, it’s really possible to grow your pea plants from store-bought peas, even though the success rate isn’t high. But you only need to get one growing, then save seeds from that one.