🫘 Zipper Cream Southern Pea

What it looks like

Why this variety

Zipper Cream earns its name the moment you shell it: each pod carries a string that works like a zipper, so the pod opens cleanly and the peas practically volunteer to come out. It is a cream crowder — pale, mild peas crowded into the pod — bred at a Florida experiment station in 1972, and extension tables list it as a low, bushy plant with a long harvest. That combination of easy shelling, mild cream flavor, and a plant that stays low and manageable is why Zipper Cream has stayed popular for fifty years while flashier peas came and went.

The flavor is the cream-pea promise kept: mild, tender, and creamy, excellent fresh and excellent frozen, with a texture that stays smooth rather than mealy. Because shelling is so easy, Zipper Cream is the variety to grow when you plan to put up a lot of peas — the difference between a pea that unzips and a pea that fights you is the difference between an afternoon’s pleasant work and an afternoon you regret. Low, bushy plants also make picking easier than vining types, and the harvest stretches over multiple pickings rather than arriving all at once.

If you are new to choosing between cultivars, the Varieties Matter guide explains why the name after the plant matters as much as the plant itself. And if you want the whole clan at a glance, the broader Southern Pea guide covers southern peas generally.

How to grow

Southern peas are the crop that laughs at a Florida summer while everything else files a complaint — they want heat, they tolerate poor sandy soil, and they fix their own nitrogen while they are at it. Sow directly once the soil is warm, well past any frost danger, and keep sowing successions through summer for a long picking season. They are not peas in the garden-pea sense at all: they are tropical beans, cousins of the black-eyed pea, and they treat a hot, humid garden the way a beachgoer treats a heat wave, as the entire point. Give them full sun, decent drainage, and room to bush or sprawl according to type, and they will feed you through the months when cool-season crops have long since given up.

Direct-sow in warm soil, an inch deep, 4 to 6 inches apart, after frost danger is past, and give this low vine room to bush out — rows two to three feet apart. Water through bloom and pod-fill, mulch once plants are up, and skip heavy nitrogen: southern peas make their own. Days to maturity vary by source, from about 65 days for fresh shelling to around 90 in extension tables, so judge by the pods — full, plump, and easy to unzip — rather than by the calendar, and succession-sow for a longer season.

Water & feeding

Southern peas are drought-tolerant once established, which is not the same as drought-loving: give them about an inch of water a week while they flower and fill pods, because dry plants drop blossoms and make thin pods. Work worm castings into the bed at sowing, and go easy on nitrogen fertilizer — these plants make their own nitrogen with the help of root bacteria, and extra nitrogen just grows leaves at the expense of peas. Mulch to hold moisture and smother weeds, water at soil level to keep foliage dry, and back off once pods start drying if you are saving dry peas.

Common problems

Cowpea curculio is the main pest, stinging pods and spoiling fresh peas, so pick promptly and discard damaged pods rather than composting them. Aphids and the mosaic viruses they carry are the next worry; inspect young growth and pull badly affected plants early. Root-knot nematodes can stunt plants in sandy soils — rotate, add organic matter, and avoid planting peas in the same spot year after year. Wet, crowded foliage invites blight, so space well and water at the base.

Harvest

Pick pods when full and plump, then unzip and shell — fresh peas cook in minutes and taste best the day they are picked. For dry peas, leave pods on the vine until they rattle, then shell and store in jars. Zipper Cream freezes beautifully after blanching, which is fortunate, because a productive planting will give you far more than one meal’s worth, and the easy shelling means you will actually process the surplus instead of watching it dry on the vine out of spite.

Saving seeds

Zipper Cream earns its name the moment you shell it: each pod carries a string that works like a zipper, so the pod opens cleanly and the peas practically volunteer to come out. It is a cream crowder — pale, mild peas crowded into the pod — bred at a Florida experiment station in 1972, and extension tables list it as a low, bushy plant with a long harvest. That combination of easy shelling, mild cream flavor, and a plant that stays low and manageable is why Zipper Cream has stayed popular for fifty years while flashier peas came and went. The flavor is the cream-pea promise kept: mild, tender, and creamy, excellent fresh and excellent frozen, with a texture that stays smooth rather than mealy. Because shelling is so easy, Zipper Cream is the variety to grow when you plan to put up a lot of peas — the difference between a pea that unzips and a pea that fights you is the difference between an afternoon of shelling and an evening of it. It is open-pollinated — Reimer lists it as “Open Pollinated… developed by the Experiment Station in Gainesville, Florida, in 1972” — so seed saved from it comes true to Zipper Cream. Southern peas are largely self-pollinating: let pods dry fully on the plant, shell them, and dry the peas well before storing. The full method is in the Saving seeds section of the Southern Pea guide.