Bonus Peas

Usually by this time of year, our pea vines are long gone. We typically pick garden peas through mid-July, and the vines turn brown and die back as temperatures rise. We've never had much luck replanting them in the fall, so we usually just freeze a year's worth of peas in the spring and call it a season by the end of July. You can see the die-back starting here:

But…what's that bit of green down there at the bottom? Let's take a closer look:

New growth on the old vines! This has never happened to use before—maybe because we pulled out the vine before they had a chance to get to this stage? I'll be honest: that's exactly what I was planning to do when I noticed the new growth. There's even a pea pod or two!

So to see this unbidden (but welcome) experiment through, I clipped the old vines just above the new growth and threw them in the compost pile. I left the new growth behind to see how big they'll get, and if we'll get a second harvest. My guess is that we'll get a little bit of growth and a few extra pea pods, but nothing like the big vines that grow in the cool, wet weather of the spring.

Here's a closer look at how the new growth popped up on the vines. The old, dying vine is to the left of the above photo, but you can see new green shoots bear the bottom to the right. Those new shoots are so close to the ground that at first I thought maybe peas had dropped and self-sown, but they're definitely attached to the original vine.

We've never seen this before. Have you? Let me know in the comments if you have any experience. For reference, the variety is "Penelope," and we bought them from Johnny's.