Little Marvel

Little Marvel is a stocky, semi-dwarf bush pea whose compact habit suits it to container growing as well as the open vegetable bed, and its upright plants need no staking. Its pods, roughly three to four inches long, hold six to nine medium green, sugary peas that keep a tender texture and sweet flavor even after ripening fully and filling out the pod. The bright green pods and consistently sweet peas have made it a long-favored heirloom, and it has earned the RHS Award for Garden Merit.

Allowed to fill completely, Little Marvel's peas are sweet enough for raw eating in dips and salads, and the harvest can be blanched and frozen to preserve it beyond the season. The variety is also suited to canning, giving gardeners fresh, frozen, and canned options from a single crop.

Little Marvel is an old, dependable variety valued for its extended picking season, fine quality, and heavy yields, with its vines specifically noted for producing heavily. A spring sowing can be trimmed back once finished, timed to make way for a summer planting that benefits from the nitrogen the pea plants have left behind in the soil. The variety also carries resistance to fusarium wilt, a soil-borne fungal disease, helping it avoid losses from that pathogen.

Little Marvel began as Sutton's Little Marvel, first brought to market by the Sutton seed house of Reading, England, in 1900, before reaching the United States in 1908 through seedsman James J. H. Gregory. Sutton recorded its parentage as a cross between 'Chelsea Gem' and Sutton's own 'A-1'.