We grow peas through the winter (as you do) on circular trellises (construction details are available here and here). Inevitably, some pods get missed and dry out on the vine. These can be harvested later for eating as dried peas or as a basis for seeding the next years crop, but finding the pods and extracting the seeds can be tedious and time consuming.
Ready to harvest the seed!
While I wasn’t really looking for an answer to my problem, I found one from history. We were watching the UK documentary series ‘Tales From the Green Valley’ where a team of archaeologists live and work on a farm in the UK as it would have been in the 1600s. As part of their activities they raised a pea crop then needed to harvest it once it had dried off, and they did that using a flail. Bingo!
If you haven’t come across the idea before, a flail is basically a long stick connected to a shorter stick by a flexible joint of some description be it leather, chain, fabric or whatever. By gripping the longer stick on can hit things on the ground with the shorter stick so that the shorter stick is level with the ground and can apply more force and over a larger area. I have seen them used with wheat, but had not thought of peas!
Making the Flail
This would be experimental so I wanted to use what I had on hand, and I had an old and somewhat decrepit broom handle 1200mm long x 20mm thick as a base. I cut it 400mm from the end so that the flail part would be 400mm long and the handle would be 800mm long. I did have some reservations as to whether the wood would be heavy enough to do the job, but this was an experiment, so……
Basic raw materials
Completed
Flexible join closeup
To join the two I cut a couple of denim strips off a dead pair of jeans, screwed one end of a denim a strip onto the end of the flail, looped it over and screwed the other end to the flail, I then did the same thing with the handle, but first looping the handle strip through the flail strip then securing the free end back onto the handle with a screw. Job done.
Using the flail
I dragged out a fabric drop cloth from the shed and spread it out on the lawn, then cut the pea plants off at the ground (leaving the nitrogen rich roots in place to rot down and fertilise the soil) and dragged everything over to the cloth. I removed all the pea vines from the trellis and placed them on the cloth and proceeded to beat the tar out of them with the flail. The flail worked as advertised and within a few minutes all the pods I could find had disgorged their contents onto the drop cloth. To be fair, a few had bounced off the cloth due to my enthusiasm but they didn’t go far and were easily recovered.
Application of the flail
Pea vines removed
Remainder concentrated together
I removed the dried-out vines from the cloth and after inspecting them consigned them to the compost, leaving the peas, leaves and some other chaff on the cloth. I gathered the cloth edges up to the middle then removed all the light chaff by hand and placed it also on the compost. The remaining peas and chaff was placed on our garden sieve, which the peas remained in while most of the lighter trash fell through or was blown off by my huffing and puffing.
We have peas!
In the end the process only took 5 to 10 minutes and was considerably more fun than hunting through the vines and splitting open the pods. If I were using the flail more than a couple of times a year I would probably construct something less experimental and more robust, but as it is it works well.
