Soak the seeds in water for a couple of hours, and certainly no more than 4-6 hours. Wrap them in a damp (but not wringing wet) paper towel or coffee filter, put it all in a zip-lock bag and zip it shut. Check the bag twice a day. As soon as you see the little sprouts emerging, take the seeds out and put them in the ground. You don't have to have sprouts from all the seeds---if a few are sprouting, then it is okay to plant them all as they others will sprout very soon thereafter. The pea plants will be up and growing in your garden in no time.

Getting good pea seed germination in cold soil outdoors can take forever some years, and pea seed can rot (or be eaten by something) before it ever sprouts. That's why so many of us sprout ours indoors and then plant it out. We need to get all the cool-season crops in the ground as early as we reasonably can in order to beat the heat that shuts down production.

I've gotten great harvests from edible-podded peas planted as late as early April, so you have plenty of time if the weather cooperates. The arrival of heat will shut down peas and there's not much a gardener can do about it, but most years that sort of heat doesn't arrive until late May thru late June, depending on your location in the state and depending on that year's weather. In 2011, though, that sort of heat arrived in April and it was a horrible pea year. There are no guarantees in gardening, especially with erratic weather like we have here in spring where it can be 20 degrees one day and 75 or 85 the next.

Thanks Dawn, for the information as well as the encouragement! I usually plant them by mid Feb but they take forever to come up. Hopefully this will help make up for that lost time. Also helps to explain why only a small percentage of my peas actually came up in past years when planted so early.

I used to plant dry pea seed directly in the ground with lousy results. Many of the seed rotted and either little mammals or bugs ate them. Then I learned about presprouting them and giving them two weeks to get up good inside. I've done that for many years. It only takes two weeks from the presprouting--(I sprout all of them and throw away the ones that don't sprout.)--to the transplanting. (Except in years like last year and this when the first batch got held over 3 weeks to their detriment. They are too leggy again.) But the second planting got planted in the toilet paper tubes in the greenhouse today. I wish I could get a good stand the way Dawn describes, but I've tried it two or three times and had almost as many peas rot planting them presprouted as planting them dry. I have very heavy soil so that is most likely a factor. So I go to the extra work to get them up and growing in the greenhouse before transplanting. I leave the toilet paper tubes (1/2 tubes) around the plants and plant them closely together under the trellis. Then to foil the rabbits we surround the plants with a short fence of chick wire. The plants grow up through it on the way to the top of the trellis.

Shelley, You're welcome. It is an unfortunate fact of life if you are an Oklahoma gardener that often seeds will rot in our cold wet soils in February and March (and even in April if the soils remain too cold and too wet). We kinda get stuck between a rock and a hard place, needing to plant early enough to beat the extreme heat that shuts down cool-season crop production but finding early seeds/plants struggle in cold, wet soil. Of course, it does depend on what sort of soil one has. Folks with well-drained, sandier or loamier soils generally have less trouble with seed rotting in cold, wet ground that folks with clay soils.

Since peas make their best growth and production in cooler soil and air temperatures, we have to sprout them outdoors in dismally cold (and usually wet soil) where it can take them up to 5 weeks to sprout. I've rarely, if ever, had pea seed survive in wet soil that long. So, I use the methods described above.

Tom Clothier's Germination vs. Temperature section of his website show us the correlation he found in his research. This data relates specifically to peas and the temperatures are soil, not air, temperatures:

At a soil temperature of 32 degrees, 0% of the seed sprouted. At 41 degrees, 89% sprouted but it took 36 days. At 50 degrees, 96% sprouted within 14 days, and at 59 degrees, 93% of the seed will sprout within 9 days. Not bad, but 9 days of very wet soil can cause the seed to rot. Taking the soil temperatures even higher, at 68 degrees, 93% also will sprout by the 9th day, but if you crank up the soil temperature to 77 degrees, you'll get 94% of it sprouted within 6 days. That is the best combination of percentage/# of days. At soil temperatures above 77 degrees, a decreasing amount sprouts, and at 95 degrees, you go back to 0% germination.

In the room where I have the light shelf, the temperature flucuates between the 60s and upper 70s, and I try to control it as much as possible by opening windows to let in cool air (all those fluorescent lights put off some heat!) and by closing the blinds to keep out too much sunlight (east and south facing windows). My peas sprout in a week or two up there.

Dorothy, I do think it likely is your heavy soil. In my front garden, I only have three raised beds that drain well enough for peas, and I try to rotate from one to the other so that they don't grow in the same place 2 years in a row. I'm kind of casual about crop rotation in general, but am more careful with peas---especially if they had PM the year before. I have to amend those beds with more compost every year or they revert to heavy clay pretty quickly. At the west end of the garden, I can grow peas in the sandier soil, but there's voles there, so I generally don't. Next year I might try them in the new back garden, but racoons have been climbing the fence, so I'll need to put a floppy chicken wire extension on top of the 8' tall fence so that when they climb up and get to that chicken wire it dumps them back onto the ground outside the fence.

One of these days I'm going to plant a determinate pea like Cascadia or Sugar Daddy in my cattle trough planter and see how they do there.

I've been giving my pea transplants "haircuts" and eating the trimmings, which sort of satisfies my snap pea hunger a little. Now I'm toying with adding another row of peas somewhere just for the pea shoots. I might plant some thickly in a couple of molasses feed tubs for that purpose.