Request from my flower loving friends.

[Pulsegleaner]

Since there are a lot of people on this forum who have MUCH bigger flower gardens than mine (including ones outside of the US, who may have better access), does anyone have, or can direct me to, seed for Lord Anson's Pea (Lathyrus nervosus). I'm having some trouble locating a source (Thompson and Morgan lists it, but it's sold out, and I think it may only be on the BRITISH side of the site.) Magellan's pea (Lathyrus nervosus var. magellenus) would be OK as well.

I'm toying with trying Chilean pea, but since 1. I have yet to see a version in a color I like and 2. It's basically a local variant of latifolius, so I have to assume that, once established it will NEVER be removable, I'm kind of inclined not to.

 

[digitS']

Chiltern Seeds has Lathyrus nervosus seeds and ..

. their website says that they will ship to the "USA ..

. (with the relevant Small Lots of Seed Permit through the USDA APHIS website)"

 

[heirloomgal]

Never heard of any of those @Pulsegleaner, I'll do some googling.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Never heard of any of those @Pulsegleaner, I'll do some googling.

Not surprised. with the Sweet Pea genus, once you get past the big three (odoratus, sativus, and latifolius). The rest seem to fall into relative obscurity. Great Britain will play around with a few more, since sweet peas are a big competition flower there, but it's spotty.

The only ones that ever really broke out besides those were chloranthus (a sort of acid yellow flowered ones) and benilensis (a very small, Middle Eastern one with two tone red and yellow flowers).

Part of it is most of the others are tiny, both of plant and flower, and tend to recede into the "sort of like a vetch" groups of plants.

Beach Pea (L. japonicus) and it's West Coast analog, silky pea (L. littloralis) have some popularity, but that usually has more with restoring beachfronts harmed by erosion than for the flowers themselves (plus, the fact that the green immature pods can be used as emergency wild food, and the mature seeds are popular with many shore birds).
Over the years, I've also managed to get my hands on sylvestris, veinosus, subandeus and whatever that little yellow flowered one with the simple (non compound) leaves I found among the vetches in those lentils is (I think alphaca, but I'd have to check the actual packet).

Same as with actual vetches. There are many, many species, but you'd generally only going to bump into five or six of them, sativus, villosa, cracca, tetrasperma (if you are in the US) and a few others. I have some hirsuta as well, but that is by sheer luck (they use it a lot more of it in India than they do here) and I only kept that one in case I ever needed to do any miniature modeling (the pods look just like microscopic pea pods (more than most vetch pods), and they DON'T shatter open automatically when ripe). Oh, and of course Fava beans are a vetch.

 

[digitS']

Fava beans are a vetch

Interesting and so they must be a good hay for livestock .

Growing vetch with oats for hay was a problem because it would tangle up in the rake and baler.

Growing Favas to enjoy at the table was a problem because the cool weather they liked would so quickly turn hot and dry that it would nearly kill them and sometimes, it would kill them.

Steve

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Interesting and so they must be a good hay for livestock .

Growing vetch with oats for hay was a problem because it would tangle up in the rake and baler.

Growing Favas to enjoy at the table was a problem because the cool weather they liked would so quickly turn hot and dry that it would nearly kill them and sometimes, it would kill them.

Steve

Hard to say. Compared to a standard vetch, favas have been developed to be a lot thicker of stem than other vetches (not to mention upright, as opposed to climbing) so I imagine that it's a lot harder to dry them down for hay without them rotting or fermenting.

I suppose that if one could find wild fava beans, they might make good hay, but no one knows exactly where favas originate (sort of like grass peas, after having been domesticated so long the domestic population has so mixed back into any wild population that no one can work out where the wild population ever was) I once HAD a pair of seeds I THOGHT might be wild (or at least, very very old) favas I found in some Indian coriander, but when I planted them one rotted (it had a crack) and the other, once I put it outside, promptly got bitten off at the base by something.

I'm not SURE it would work, but assuming you were using one of the commoner vetches in your work (sativa, villosa etc.) you actually might do better with tetrasperma or hirsuta. They're much thinner, more delicate plants, so they probably wouldn't offer as much tensile resistance as the thicker ones.

I have the same problem with favas (or any other cool weather legume). In general, I've found that, the smaller the seeds and plants, the faster they tend to grow and mature, so you might want to focus on the smaller types of favas found in places like the Mediterranean and Middles east; the kind that are often ground into flour instead of being used whole (REAL Egyptian falafel is ALWAYS fava flour, not chickpea, as is foul).

The BEST fava I ever got was a sort of in between hybrid one I found in some small ones, but I lost those to a very bad heat spike and don't have any more (only visual I have that could help is that the seed coat had a pitted texture, like an orange peel.)

 

[baymule]

I didn’t know fava was a vetch. Can’t grow them here anyway, it’s too hot. There is hairy vetch in the pasture that just comes up Year after year, but goes quickly when it gets hot.

 

[Branching Out]

I didn’t know fava was a vetch. Can’t grow them here anyway, it’s too hot. There is hairy vetch in the pasture that just comes up Year after year, but goes quickly when it gets hot.

You may just be able to grow them in Texas if you start them in a cool basement and then plant them out early with some kind of protection. Fava seem to like a cool start and a hot finish. Joseph Lofthouse suggests planting out seedlings 'when the crocus blooms', and I am going to give that a try this year. My plan is to start some every three weeks or so, in order that the plants on the north side of the patch can go in first and put on a bit of growth before I tuck in a new row of seedlings in front of them. Last year was my first time growing and tasting fava, and I can't say that I was wowed by the flavour of them when eaten fresh; my girlfriend LOVES them though, so perhaps it is an acquired taste. They also attract blackfly big time. Despite all of this they were a lot of fun to grow!

 

[Zeedman]

I didn’t know fava was a vetch. Can’t grow them here anyway, it’s too hot. There is hairy vetch in the pasture that just comes up Year after year, but goes quickly when it gets hot.

In warmer climates (where the ground doesn't freeze) favas can sometimes be grown as a Winter crop. I observed this when I lived in the San Francisco Bay area, where favas & Chinese cabbages were often grown over the winter. That was the first time I ever saw favas in the field, those black & white flowers really caught my eye.

Like cabbages, favas will take a little frost... not sure how much of a hard freeze they would take though. Presumably they would survive anywhere that English peas can be grown in Winter.

 

[baymule]

Our Christmas present from Winter was a week of freezing weather, got to 11F here. Now a week later it’s going to be a high of 70F today and 76F tomorrow. Stupid weather. Usually we have our coldest weather in January and/or February. So we will probably have some more freezes coming. By March, hard freezes are done, May and it gets hot.

@Branching Out no basements here! Water table is too high and across the South, basements are few and far between.

Our cold freeze burnt the hairy vetch and wither rye grass back to the roots. But it’s starting to come back out.