Of course most people grow pea plants for the peas or the pods, but you can also grow them for the plants themselves.
Pea shoots are a very fashionable ingredient in fancy restaurants, and with good reason. They are sweet and crunchy and extremely nutritious. A great addition to any salad.
Essentially you grow lots of pea plants close together, and then as they get a few inches tall and start to send out tendrils (but before getting tall and leggy) you harvest the top few inches of the plants. It means you can get hundreds of plants in to a window box. You can snip a few square inches of plants off in one go, or hand pick them.
This video by James Pearson is a very brief introduction to how to grow pea shoots.
If you want to see how the shoots look as they grow, here's a lovely time lapse by wildlife photographer Neil Bromhall.
If you want to see how thickly you can grow a mat of peas shoots, check out this short video by Corinna Borden which shows a tray which has had all the shoots snipped off. The video points out that the leftovers are a great addition to your compost, because peas fix nitrogen in the soil.
