Marshall's Bananaphone Pea

This past year I grew a rare variety of pea named Marshall’s bananaphone. What an amazing name! I grew them in the hope of building up seed numbers and distributing them.  Unfortunately it didn’t really work out that way.

The birds decided they were going to dig up and eat most of my pea seed, so I didn't get many more seeds from any variety that I planted this year. Marshall’s banana phone is no exception to this. I protected a few plants, but nowhere near as many as I planted.

To top this off, every time I looked away the kids would eat a few more of them. As I couldn’t increase the seed numbers significantly I thought I would write a description of this variety of yellow podded shelling pea.

Marshall's Bananaphone not yet ripe

Marshall’s banana phone are a shelling pea that has regular pea leaf and is a climbing plant. The plant is not particularly tall but is certainly not a dwarf. I grew them up tripods of sticks and they did rather well.

Each plant produced a good number of white flowers, normally in sets of two. They did not suffer from any diseases here, but no variety I grew this year suffered disease so this may not actually mean anything. Like every other variety of pea I have ever grown, as soon as the heat hit they started to die.

Marshall's Bananaphone

Marshall's Bananaphone Pea - quite productive

None of what I have told you so far, apart from the really cool name, is particularly amazing and none of this sets it apart from the many other varieties of pea that you could grow. Then the pods formed. Wow.

The pods set Marshall’s banana phone apart from any variety of shelling pea I have grown. The pods are the reason to grow peas in the first place, so it is good that the pods are what makes this variety unique.

Marshall’s banana phone grows long yellow pods. Having yellow pods means that they are easier to see among the green foliage. This makes harvest much faster and ensures that I don’t miss any by mistake.

Marshall's Bananaphone Peas

I have grown several yellow podded snow peas, but never a yellow podded shelling pea. Marshall’s banana phone are not snow peas, they are regular shelling peas.

The long yellow pods are remarkably uniform and most contained 10 peas per pod. That is a lot of peas per pod. This is far more impressive than it sounds. ‘Green Feast’ is a productive pea variety that is the standard by which most shelling peas are measured,  they normally only produce 5 to 8 peas per pod. Given the high number of pods set, and the larger number of peas per pod, Marshall’s banana phone is a productive variety.

Marshall's Bananaphone Pea - white flowers, yellow pods

The peas themselves tasted good straight off the plant, nice and sweet. Unfortunately we didn’t get to cook any because the kids ate them all before I could get them in the house. They picked and ate so many every time they walked past the garden I am lucky that I was able to save any seed at all!

Marshall's Bananaphone Pea - seeds ready for saving

Setting multiple flowers, growing easy to see yellow pods, and being really consistent in setting 10 seeds per pod makes Marshall’s banana phone a productive variety of pea.