We eat salad all year round in our house, so we get through many bags of prepared salad leaves. Baby leaves, rocket and pea shoots are yummy but can be expensive and wasteful if use by dates are missed. So as it is super easy, I have already started growing my cut and come again lettuce, with some already harvested and eaten. In addition this year, I decided to grow some pea shoots to improve our salad mix.

I had read that it is possible and much cheaper to grow pea plants using dried peas intended for cooking. So I bought a box for 50p (which is a quarter of the price of regular seeds) and used a 1/3 of the packet. So, so far so good.

I soaked them in water overnight until they looked like proper peas again.

Then filled a seed tray with compost, To make sure the compost is good and wet I stood the tray in water until the compost had up soaked as much water as possible. Then covered the soil, completely with a layer of the peas, leaving only a small gap between each one. A layer of compost on top, a little watering and the planting was complete.

I placed the tray on my sunny kitchen window and two days later the first shoots were appearing.

After a week the shoots were pushing up the soil.

By the third week they were ready to harvest.

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