Swedish Blue Podded Pea Visingsö

The Visingsö blue podded pea is a heritage variety that is hard to come by. We grow and  maintain a small amount for genetic conservation and potential future breeding.

The Visingsö variety grows to ca. 2m height and needs support. It produces blue pea pods with good green peas inside.

The peas taste nice and can be eaten fresh from the vine when mature. When they get older and “fatter” they were historically used in cooking like soups, mash, bread etc. Immature pods can be eaten as mangetout, but as they get older they need to be shelled.

As with most old pea varieties they can be dried for later use or to be ground to a kind of flour which can be mixed in to bread flour for added nutrition and flavour.

In our experience it is a hardy and healthy pea variety. However, like some other old varieties the pods have a tendency to lose some of their blue colour across generations. Seed saving should therefore only be done from the blue pods.

Please note that the variety, at least the population we have, probably have not been maintained with a strict selection of the blue pods. It is thus an ongoing project for us to improve the blue characteristics.

We only offer a small amount of peas from this variety for sale to enthusiasts that want to preserve the variety by using them.

Some notes on the origin of the variety

There are many Swedish heritage varieties saved in seed banks etc. Typically the origin of the varieties is forgotten and the seed banks often simply give the variety the name of the area where they were collected. This is also true in the case of this variety. Visingsö is a populated island in lake Vättern located in county Småland, southern Sweden. This county is known for being where Carl von Linné was born as well as being the original home of IKEA and Husqvarna.

There are 15 blue podded heritage pea varieties collected from different locations in Sweden listed in the book “Klint Karins kålrot och Kurt Jönssons bondböna”. The authors note that it is likely that several of the varieties are localised variations of the same variety.

Some Swedish seed catalogues from the 19th century contained blue peas named “Capuziner”. It is likely the Capucijner pea, AKA Blauwschokker, is the distant parent for most, if not all, of the 15 varieties listed in the book.

Since the peas have been spread across Sweden and grown in many gardens for perhaps 100 years, who knows what crosses and adaptations have occurred. This is similar to how genetically diverse landraces evolve. Perhaps it is not so strange that the Visingsö pea is a bit more diverse than the more strictly maintained Capucijner pea.