I've been meaning to share with you how I harvested & cleaned our peas for winter food and next year's seed! I hope this comes in handy to you for processing bulk seed!

We sure did enjoy eating a lot of peas this spring and early summer! It is incredible that we started with just a handful of peas that I saved from a homestead I volunteered for in Washington 2 years ago.

We enjoyed several waves of young and mature green peas in their pods.

We harvested many pounds of fresh peas and even fed family some good meals with them while they were in town visiting, during a time when there was not a whole lot else in the garden yet, except of course greens!

I do have a new found respect for fresh peas

An early and vigourous producer in a temperate climate - a veggie which I have not really tuned into so much in my past (but have always enjoyed when I ate them).

Well now the season for peas has past just in time for the spoils of summer to arrive!. This is what the peas looked like a few weeks ago.

As I mentioned in my Goodbye peas post I couldn't wait for the vines to completely dry because I needed the sun to become unblocked in this garden bed for my J-chokes!

The reason I bring it up again is because I realized that there was a beautiful opportunity for me to harvest both dried peas and full grown yet still green peas.

• The green peas I would dry and save for eating in the winter.
• The dried peas would be saved for seed for next spring planting.
• But I wouldn't need all the dried peas for planting so some of those can be winter eating too!

Here are the green peas laid out to dry in the shade.

Finally I took the dried peas and separated them from their shells. Rather than cracking them open one by one which would have taken quite a while, I threshed and winnowed them. I am sorry I don't have photos of this part of the process but I will describe it in detail for now and show photos of the threshing and winnowing with other seeds in the near future.

To thresh the peas in their shells I crushed them by stepping on them lightly on a tarp. I also tried crushing them in a bucket by rolling them between my hands and it worked well. Most 95% of the peas get out of the hulls this way, some will need further separating later.

Then I setup a fan on high speed and two bins. One to catch the peas and one to catch the chaff. Simply pour the peas and chaff from your bucket or container into the bin closest to the fan and let the chaff fly off into the second bin. If too much chaff gets into the first bin you can adjust height and distance from fan to fine tune the process

Some of each will get into the other bin and that's OK. Simply repeat the process several times and then you should have fairly clean if not totally clean peas!

It took me about 4 times and picking through a few straggling pieces of chaff and the peas were clean!

This video shows the process of winnowing the peas from the chaff:

You can use this process to clean many types of seeds if you care about getting the chaff out either for food or for ease of planting.

Sometimes we gardeners don't care about planting the seeds with a little chaff in it because, hey it all goes back to the ground anyway. But a lot of chaff can get in the way or be time consuming when planting if we are trying to be precise.

Speaking of which --

It is now time to plant peas again if you want a late fall harvest! I know... crazy right?

The circle continues and the past is connected to the future by the present. Perhaps we are always with the cycle of the peas at any point in time.

Important Note:

I put my peas in the freezer for a few weeks to kill any pee weavil larvae and prevent pea weavils from eating my peas while they are in storage. I learned that the hard way earlier this spring!

In case you were wondering why these pea jars are frosty.. that's why.

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