Soup Peas, Trellis' of the Ancient Ones

[oxbowfarm]

In days of old when men were bold, how the hell did they trellis their pease porridge pea vines?

I grew several soup pea varieties last year, a few I trellissed like my market peas, but some I let flop when clearly they wanted something to climb. What were the solutions of the ancient ones to the problem of pea trellis? It takes quite a few rows of peas to make a significant amount of peas, so how to do build a trellis fast and strong enought to hold till the pods are dry and the peas are ready to thresh?

[steev]

Prunings of whatever, gotten by hook or by crook, stuck in the ground. Actual trellises? Not for commoners!

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I grow just about everything sprawling: tomatoes, pole beans, runners, peas, cucumbers, melons, squash. If they required trellises I wouldn't grow them. In my garden with less than optimal weeding they often use red-root, or wild lettuce, or lambsquarters as trellises. Ok. Much less than optimal weeding! Sunflowers make great trellises for runner beans. I plant sunflowers 2 months before beans so they get a great head start and are not overwhelmed by the beans.

[blueadzuki]

A fine idea today, but of course the olden men would not have had sunflowers (North American crop).
As much as I hate to say it, I rather suspect that the answer is they didn't they just let the plants sprawl and climb over each other in a tangle. They probably treated thier soup peas like a grain crop; letting the dry peas stay on the vines until season's end then taking in the WHOLE plants and threshing them. So long as your peas no longer shatter, this is perfectly doable. The "pick each pod as it comes into ripeness" is a fine plan if you have a little patch, but is not really efficient if you have a huge field. After all did you ever hear of a wheat farmer who harvests his crop one head at a time? (well, I do, but I grow mine on an experimental basis, so ther're only a few dozen heads total.)
I had similar questions the first time I grew rice beans; given how sprawly and entangled the plants get, how the heck do they get the ripe pods harvested on a field wide basis? (a big part of why I wind up with so few good seeds at years end from my own is that in the process of harvesting the first ones the ripen, I tend to do so much damage to the plants that the rest of the pods start dying, along with the plants themselves.) I suspect that they do the same thing; let everything dry down, then run a combine through the field (though if that's the case, it means there is no reason for me to harvest in the destructive way I do, since to pull that off, modern rice beans must not shatter, and my paranoia is unjustified.) Though it turns out that they DO grow them with supports in some parts of the world; they use okra plants (which explains why I sometimes find okra seeds mixed into the bags of beans.)
Maybe that's one of the reasons Fava beans were bred to buck the family trends and be mostly bush plants (and you could probably say the same thing for most soy) If you are growing a big field, you don't want to put in a support system, and you can't count on the fist maturers of you crop staying good on the plant while the later ones catch up, having them upright is probably a sensible idea. As I said before, I rather think the main reason why such a large portion of cultivated common bean varieites are still pole is because they were being grown Three Sisters style, so you had basically a trellis system already up and running in the form of the cornstalks.

[robertb]

Hazel. It was very widely grown as coppice for all sorts of uses. The sticks were used for peas. Then coppice fell out of use around the time of WW2. Long pea sticks became unobtainable, and as a result, tall peas went out of fashion.

[greenpond]

Last year I used a couple of t-posts and stretched chicken wire between them for my soup peas. Worked quite well. Depending on how long your rows are you'll probably need a post every 10 feet or so.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

The first year I tried growing a shattering bean I picked the pods. I suspect that I lost more beans than I harvested. The second year I pulled the whole plants and threw them on a tarp to finish drying, and then beat them with a stick and stomped on them. That worked much better. I pretty much harvest all my dry beans and dry peas these days (both pole and bush) by picking the whole plant and threshing them over a tarp. That would be much harder if they were growing on trellises.

[steev]

I grow mine on fenceing mesh, and hope, this year, to have enough to pull plants, rather than picking pods. If so, I'll bundle the plants in burlap tarps, suspend them off the ground (away from rodents and rot), and eventually tread them out when dry. This is generally my plan for legumes; seems to work.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I have to be careful about "eventually" with peas. Because when I harvest the seed they have eggs or larva of weevils. So if I don't dry them promptly and get them into the freezer the bugs continue to grow inside the seed until they hollow it out. Hard to want to eat peas containing bugs, and germination becomes iffy.

[steev]

Added protein, though. You don't really want the ones you eat to germinate, do you?

[raymondo]

By the way oxbow, what varieties of soup pea did you grow? I've only grown a couple of varieties that are specifically for soup - Capucijner and Subfrufrum.

[oxbowfarm]

Feb 23, 2014 16:04:09 GMT -5 raymondo said:

By the way oxbow, what varieties of soup pea did you grow? I've only grown a couple of varieties that are specifically for soup - Capucijner and Subfrufrum.

raymondo I grew some Subfrufrum that I rec'd from you. Also a small sample of Carlin from another person on HG, can't remember who off the top of my head. I also grew Joseph's soup pea which is a Blue Pod Capucijner-type, and Australian pea from the Backyard Beans and Grains Project which I was really impressed with for yield. It is very similar seed to Carlin, mottled green/orange but a slightly different tone.

This year I plan on a little larger effort with more serious trellis work now that I have a decent amount of seed. I also got some Biskopens Graeart from trixtrax that I am eager to trial.

I'm thinking about a modified wire/pea stick trellis. A t-post on both ends with a stretch of hi-tensile wire strung across at the top of the posts, then tall pea sticks along the length of the row with maybe a wrap of twine to lash the sticks to the wire. We'll see. I have a lot of new pollard willow to use for the pea sticks.

[flowerweaver]

Tim, I like your wire/pea stick idea. About the only straight sticks we have here are yucca stalks and I think they aren't strong enough for something like that. This year I am trellising pole beans on Deer-X, a plastic netting, stretched between t-posts. It's cheaper than chicken wire. We'll see how it holds up, got it up today.

[steev]

Fence-mesh (2"x4"} is much more durable than chickenwire; deer-netting is a PITA (can't get vines out easily, prolly don't want to burn it).

It's always tempting to go short-term, but so often, we outlast our expectations and it costs us more.

I've gotten an image of you out in the middle of nowhere, which, if true, makes it all the more important that you invest wisely in infrastructure. I think I may have some understanding of your situation, living 2.5 hours from my farm, which is 1.5 hours from Home Despot. I can't blithely pop off to the hardware store, nor do I think you can. One must make one's trips count; buy what will last; it's cheaper in the long run, and so many of us will need it longer than we might think.

[oxbowfarm]

Plus one nice thing about living in the desert is how metal takes forever to rust. A big roll of woven wire for trellis will prolly last you indefinitely if you're careful.