[Sca-cooks] Fresh chick peas and growing chick peas

[Sharon Gordon]

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The best source of chick pea seeds that I know of is the US chick pea seed collection.  They have literally 100's of different ones.  In the early 1990's the list was over 80 pages long.

They even have some of the tiny chick peas that can be popped (avoid trying to pop and eat larger chick peas as they will break teeth).

To learn about growing chick peas and accessing the US collection, read the second edition of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carol Deppe.  She gives instructions and addresses.

To me the plants are very beautiful.  However the ones I have grown tend to have one to two chick peas per pod.  So shelling them out is a rather slow process.  On the other hand, the fresh ones cook a lot faster than the dried, so you gain something there.

The only place I have seen them growing in a garden open to the general public is in the Rodale Research gardens in Pennsylvania.  I don't know that they grow them every year, so you might check first.  Though if you love gardens, something else there will bring you joy even if there are no chick peas that year.

More than likely the place that collects them also has a place(or several) to grow them out so you might be able to see them that way too if one of them is near you.

Sharon
gordonse at one.net


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