Category: Home & Garden

‘THE DREAM has always been a rainbow of peas.” That’s what Dylana Kapuler, co-owner of Peace Seedlings, said to me more than a decade ago, and that dream continues to fuel a passion for breeding colorful, edible-podded peas at the organically managed, Oregon-based seed company.

Ready to think beyond your basic green pods and expand your palette to purple and yellow and even reddish shades, including ones with flowers and gorgeous colors that hummingbirds especially love, too? Dylana Kapuler and Mario DiBenedetto, who founded Peace Seedlings in 2008 after helping Dylana’s parents, Alan and Linda Kapuler, with their longtime seed-breeding project called Peace Seeds, have built on the impressive legacy of Alan’s decades of organic seed breeding—including colorful peas.

They also have lots of other legumes, including 15 kinds of edamame, and we talked about how easy those are to grow, too, among other catalog features.

Their catalog is old-school style: Browse the variety list on their website, write up your order, and put it and your check for seeds and shipping in an envelope.

Read along as you listen to the Feb. 9, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

colorful peas and more, with peace seedlings

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Margaret Roach: Busy, busy? Has seed season been revving up this month?

Dylana Kapuler: Definitely seed-packing season. And here in Oregon, definitely spring always starts early and we’re ready to start planting peas and all sorts of other things.

Margaret: Oh my goodness. Yeah, like much of the country, we’re frozen in the Northeast.

Mario DiBenedetto: We’ve had a very mild fall and I mean now even the beginning of winter-

Dylana: I was going to say we hardly had winter, really.

Mario: Yeah, we were ready just to skip winter and go from fall to spring, but winter did decide to come last week for a few days. We had some low 20s, but nothing that peas can’t take. At least we’ve selected ours for planting them out early, usually February, sometimes even January. And in our climate, we have enough days or nights in the 40s, days in the upper 40s-lower 50s, that they germinate, come up, and then by the time spring comes, they’re ready to jam.

Margaret: So the sort of history of your peas, it started with your father, I suppose, Dylana, breeding peas? So is some of the oldest sort of genetic material or whatever we want to call it, some of the oldest varieties, how old do you think?

Dylana: Oh gosh. My Dad started growing, well, breeding peas in I’m sure probably the 90s, maybe actually even 80s, he started playing in the peas. He really was inspired by [Gregor] Mendel and kind of blown away by all his discoveries and intrigue of peas in general, and read a lot of about Mendel, which is an old-school way, old-school pea breeder, for those that don’t know.

Margaret: Sure, of course.

Dylana: Most people know, but I thought I’d throw that in there. He also really was kind of put off by all the PVPs and-

Mario: Privatization.

Dylana: The privatization of a lot of the pea varieties that were available. And so he wanted to make peas that didn’t have any strings attached. And so the first pea that he did was ‘Sugaree,’ which is just your classic delicious green vine pea. Very standard, but was a step above the ones that had PVPs [Plant Variety Protection], so you could save your own seeds as much as you want.

Margaret: It’s kind of like the open-source idea of seed genetics, so that they were open-pollinated/open-source. Nobody was patenting them, so to speak [laughter].

Dylana: Yep, you got it. And then he also really was very quickly, it was like, well, how do I make an edible purple pea? So he’s spent a good 20 years trying to make the first of its class of edible purple pea snap pea.

Mario: Because there was purple shelling peas, or there’s some old European varieties that were purple shelling peas. So the genetics were out there, but just not an edible-podded purple.

Margaret: Oh, I didn’t know that. There were shelling peas with the purple pod. That’s interesting.

Dylana: So he spent the first decade making the cross in the wrong direction and didn’t get anywhere but a bitter pea. And so then he went back and started making the crosses in a different direction and then created ‘Sugar Magnolia’ [top of page], which was of its own kind, a delicious, really tall vine, purple-flowered, purple-podded snap pea.

Margaret: That’s wonderful. And it’s become quite a hit, I think. I mean, other seed companies carry it mean it’s become quite a thing. People love it, I think, who have seen it and tried it.

Mario: Yeah, it’s definitely become one of the more distributed pea varieties that he bred probably at this point.

Dylana: Well, ‘Green Beauty’ [above] was also a standard more of a snow pea, but when you let it mature—we kind of call it a snow-snap, because when you let it mature, it gets really delicious and amazing and big and plump, and hands-down, one of the most amazing peas that he bred, in my opinion, in terms of flavor and versatility. We’ve gotten a lot of rave reviews about it.

Margaret: So that’s ‘Green Beauty.’ Now, I believe years ago when we spoke about peas, not on the podcast, but just together, you called them “puffer pods,” is that right? [Laughter.] Did I make that up? Do you call then puffer pods?

Mario: We did use that terminology. Yeah. I mean, it is a unique trait.

Margaret: Yes.

Mario: I mean, shell peas actually do it as well. They sort of puff up if you are paying attention. And a lot of people think that snow peas should be picked flat, which you can pick a snow pea flat; that’s fine. But if you let the seeds mature—I mean, just like a snap pea, they’re a lot sweeter once they mature. And a lot of snow peas are that way. Some get woodier, but ‘Green Beauty’ is one of those you let it fully puff up, fully mature almost as fat as a snap pea, but it’s a snow pea, and it is the most delicious pea and has that a unique crunch. That’s the thing. The puffer pods have this crunch that’s almost comparable to a potato chip, or just that satisfying texture in your mouth.

Margaret: Yeah, no, that’s the kind of peas that I like the most because it’s sort of like you’re getting the two-for-one thing, and like you say, it’s that textural thing as well as the flavor thing. But it is counterintuitive as you see the pods get to a certain size. If you have never grown one of these snow-snaps—I think it’s a good term that you’ve made up for them—if you’ve never seen what you’re thinking, “Oh gosh, the pod’s going to be all stringy and nasty and woody,” and “Oh, I’ve let it go too far. I’ve let it go too far.” Do you know what I mean? Yeah, because not all varieties can do that, can go that far.

So your focus really is edible-podded peas, right? Not shelling peas, is that correct?

Mario: Yeah, that’s pretty much.

Dylana: There’s one old heirloom that we grow, ‘Multistar,’ that’s a bush shell pea that we grow and offer in our seed list, but it’s just because it’s an awesome variety. I love to have shell peas in the freezer regardless.

Mario: But all the varieties that we have bred, we’ve focused on edible pods of both snaps, snows and some that are sort of in-between.

Margaret: Right. And the colors: So your father, Dylana, knew that—Alan knew that there was purple in the genetics of peas, in the shelling peas, and he worked to try to get that in. You have some that are yellow pods and you have some that are almost like a, I don’t know, like they’re blushed or reddish kind of looking, all kinds of stuff going on. I mean, how does that all happen [laughter]?

Dylana: Totally. So the yellow also, he did develop a yellow snap pea that he used ‘Golden Sweet,’ which is a snow pea and a old Indian variety, I believe, to make ‘Opal Creek,’ which is a yellow snap vine. And so that was the yellow that he created.

And it’s a—well, I’m going to go off on tendrils for a second, because it’s a regular tendril pea, which most people are more familiar with. A regular tendril has got a curl with a handful of little curls off of it. Whereas he started breeding hypertendril peas, we call them, which is more like… I mean, I don’t know the best way to call it is a hypertendril, it’s like 10 tendrils put together or something. So it has the ability to hold on and take care of itself better than most peas. They’re a lot easier to trellis considering.

Most all the peas we have bred so far are vines. They hold onto the trellis a lot better than regular tendril peas, which is to me a big deal, because I love peas, but definitely if you get some kind of stormy weather in the spring, you can end up with some peas pulling off the trellis. So in a lot of the breeding that we’ve done, we’ve continued pushing for more and more hypertendril peas.

Margaret: Right. No, it’s a great, and the first time I saw it when I grew one of your varieties, I was like, “What the heck is this?…” [laughter], because like, really, it’s a difference. I don’t know if it’s like 10 to 1 or whatever, but the little curlicue things, there’s more of them, and they really do hold on, and it’s great. It’s quite different.

The other thing that’s different is a lot of peas that are the sort of brand-name generic, ubiquitous pea varieties—some of which are great tasting and so forth, but as you point out, a lot of them are kind of the patented types or whatever; they’re not open-source—a lot of them have white flowers. And you have a lot that when I grew them, wow, some of the flowers were just—I thought it was almost like I was growing the floral sweet peas. Do you know what I mean? It was like, they’re just beautiful flowers. So that diversity comes in from all over the place?  [Below, ‘Purple Beauty.’]

Mario: That might’ve been from the purple-podded peas, I think was where that…. that’s a good question. Yeah, I mean, so Dylana’s Dad originally did making the ‘Sugar Magnolia’ and the hypertendril, so those purple genetics… I think one of the parents he used was this purple-podded ‘Parsley Pea’ is what they call it. And instead of tendrils, it had leaflets, and it’s very unique; it’s a bush pea, a shelling pea-

Dylana: More of a salad plant is what it was sent to him as. Some friend sent it to him: “Oh, you might be interested in this. This is a really cool salad plant.” The tendrils, just like if anyone who doesn’t know to pick the top of a pea or the tendril of a pea at the right stage, and they’re absolutely delicious.

Margaret: Like pea shoots, so to speak. Pea greens, pea shoots. Yeah. Fantastic. Delicious.

Dylana: Yeah, and then really nutritious. I mean, a lot of the other part that my Dad was always really inspired by was how can we up the nutrition in regular vegetables that we already grow? And so that always was part of the inspiration behind purple-podded peas was purple-podded peas are high in anthocyanins. So getting more nutrition in our diet and all the ordinary vegetables that we eat is just going to benefit all of us.

Mario: And so he didn’t, I don’t think, realize that crossing that ‘Parsley Pea,’ they call it—it had leaflets instead of tendrils—that crossing that with a regular tendril was what created the hypertendril. And so that was just sort of an anomaly and part of the breeding process, when you bring together unique, obscure genetics, sometimes what you hope for is stuff to happen that you didn’t even realize. I mean, that’s good alchemy is getting greater than the sum of the original parts. Something new happens.

And so there was a lot of, to get his original ‘Sugar Magnolia,’ the purple pod, and the ‘Opal Creek,’ the yellow, and this large ‘Green Beauty,’ or at least ‘Green Beauty’ and ‘Sugar Magnolia,’ because those are both purple flowers. So then we had a purple, a green and a yellow. And so the next thing was how do we get some of the rest of the rainbow?

And it was actually a woman in Europe who had an online blog. And this is when we were first starting in 2008 maybe, and she had a blog talking about making these bright red peas, and she had pictures of them and they were totally amazing, super-gorgeous, but they weren’t edible pods. And so it was like, whoa-

Dylana: And what led us down that rabbit hole, where my Dad found it, and she was using some of my Dad’s varieties as parents. And so then it lit the fire behind him again of, “Oh my God, we need to get back into this pea-breeding project.” It was kind of set aside because of all the things that you do in life.

Mario: So the realization was that to get red, you cross the purple and the yellow. I mean, it seems pretty obvious. So we finally did that, and that’s where we got the ruby color is that purple over a yellow pod. And that was as close as we had gotten to-

Dylana: So then we have ‘Ruby Beauty’ [above], which is a snow vine, and ‘Ruby Crescent,’ which is a snap of that similar color. And it’s just a unique color. It’s not quite the red that we had originally thought of creating at that moment, but-

Mario: When they’re young, they are pretty darn red. As they mature, the purple is more pronounced, so it’s more of a ruby color. We were still excited.

Dylana: The way they look in the garden when the sun comes through them is the work of art. It’s like stained glass. It’s just really amazing. And they taste delicious and I feel like bring a new hue, which is pretty fun and amazing.

Margaret: So in breeding peas, are you out there with a paintbrush moving pollen around, or what?

Dylana: In breeding peas, not quite with the paintbrush. We use the flower, the decapitated flower I guess, as the paintbrush. But yeah.

Margaret: O.K., so you’re moving… you’re taking flowers and touching them to one another.

Mario: What a lot of people don’t realize is that a pea flower, once it’s opened, it’s already pollinated. So they’re not dependent on pollinators to make pods. They’re fine, and they’re happy that bumblebees really love them; pollinators can come.

Dylana: The hummingbirds love them, as you said of the purple flowers [below].

Mario: But the reality is they’ve already pollinated themselves, and so you don’t get much outbreeding they call it. Because of that, they’re pretty self-fertile. And so to make a cross, you have to open a flower before it opens, or break apart a flower before it opens, and take pollen from a different one that’s mature and pollinate that flower. So yeah, it is, of all of the breeding, it is very hands-on, meticulous work.

Dylana: The first year, if you’re lucky, you get four or five seeds [laughter]. And then definitely every cross is a very coveted pod. And even the next year, I remember my 3-year-old when she was little, she went out and just picked some peas. I was like, “Wait, what are you doing?” Those first couple years are definitely very finite, the number of seeds that you get.

Margaret: Mendel must have been a patient man [laughter]. Apparently you have no shortage of other legumes, I noticed, I was looking at the list again this week on your website, and you have 15 kinds of edamame type soybeans, more green beans that I can count. And I mean, you definitely have a thing for peas and beans don’t you two? [Laughter.]

Dylana: Yeah, I feel like part of it is I grew up vegetarian, and my parents were always really passionate about having a diverse, nutritious diet. And obviously legumes are some of the highest in amino acids. And my Dad always was really passionate about, really, we don’t need protein, we need all the amino acids that make up the protein, that nourish us.

Mario: Your body breaks proteins down into these free amino acids. That’s what we use. So just a different way of thinking about nutrition.

Margaret: So the legumes are—and I’m a vegetarian for probably 50 years already, so legumes are an important part of that diet; so I get it. I didn’t know that was your reasoning. So that’s interesting.

Dylana: I don’t think it’s a preconceived reasoning, but when you say that, that’s what comes to mind is probably the natural reason behind it. I mean, there was also that in the Willamette Valley, people weren’t growing soybeans. And there was this amazing seed curator, Robert Lobitz, when my Dad was part of the Seeds Savers Exchange network, and he had this incredible list of soybeans. So him and my Dad became seed allies and mail-order friends, so to say. And he started ordering a lot of his soybeans and testing then, seeing how they grew in the Valley. And so then he started accumulating a collection of soybeans that grew really well for us. And I mean, edamame is such a fun crop, so delicious and so easy to freeze it and stash it. And yet not a lot of people realize how easy it is.

Margaret: It was like, “Margaret, why aren’t you growing these?” Because I mean, if I go to a restaurant that has them, I want a whole big bowl of them. I love them, and sort of just steamed with a little salt or whatever and eat them whole. So are they easy to grow? Are they like growing peas or is there some trick?

Dylana: They’re almost easier to grow. You don’t need a trellis. I mean, they are plant with a lot of structure. They hold their pods right on the plant. They pretty much, most edamame, they mature all at once. So when you have a mature edamame plant, you can cut the whole plant, take it out into the shade in the summer and strip all the pods off at once.

Mario: I think that like any garden plant, it comes down to timing. And the edamame are probably one of the later legume that you plant.

Dylana: For us at least. I mean, we have obviously a different season than some people.

Mario: But they like warmer soils, so it’s a little later into spring to get them to germinate. Well, I mean that’s really the only trick. Other than that they’re just as easy as any green bean or any other legume.

Margaret: Well, you have quite the list of those. There’s so many things on the list [laughter]. I always like to pore over your list and see what what’s on offer. You sort of have this sesame grex—tell me what the heck is that?

Mario: Well, yeah, and it’s one of the few things we don’t use the word grex, but yeah, maybe we do. We call it Shades of Sesame.

Margaret: Shades of Sesame, O.K.

Mario: It is a grex. I mean, we started with white, tan and black sesame, and we really like gomashio, we like za’atar, we like tahini. For a vegetarian, it’s a high-nutrition, good food. And so we had been motivated to grow our own. And then once we realized-

Dylana: It’s very subtropical, you have to also realize normally sesame is a subtropical crop. And so as Mario was saying, we realized we needed to interbreed them to maybe get them to work well in our climate outside. So, sure, we could grow them in a greenhouse, but we don’t really have a lot of greenhouse space, and we prioritize it for things that really need it.

Mario: And we wanted to select for hopefully something that people all over the country could be growing that would maybe be more adapted to cooler, cooler climates.

Dylana: So now we have this really epic, as we call it, Shades of Sesame. It’s got gray seeds and tan seeds, white seeds and black seeds, all the different mixes. And we’ve really made a lot of progress in getting it to grow better and better in our climate, and we can easily pull off a crop. I don’t know, I think we grew 10 pounds last year, which isn’t even that big of an amount of space. It’s actually impressive how much you can grow in a generally pretty small space. And what’s really cool about sesame is it’s a really easy—I mean, I guess I can’t really call it a grain because it’s not, but it’s similar to grains in certain ways. But the pods just open up. And so when the pods start opening up, you cut it and you let it finish drying, and then you can just shake it out and it just pours out of the pods.

Margaret: So it doesn’t need some kind of big processing.

Dylana: Exactly.

Mario: No, the term “open sesame,” it comes from the seed pod.

Margaret: [Laughter.] I didn’t know that. That’s so funny.

Mario: Yeah, if you space out, all of a sudden those pods are opening and your sesame is sort of on the ground in your field.

Margaret: I wanted to ask you about one more thing, which is amaranth, not just for flowers, but for microgreens.

Mario: Yeah, I mean, microgreens has been an interesting, really popular thing that’s happening right now all over. And so we’re at the Saturday market and we have friends there that are doing microgreens, and the red amaranth, the most common one, ‘Red Garnet,’ you can see why people grow it. It’s neon pink, it looks amazing. It’s high nutrition.

Dylana: Super-mild flavor.

Mario: And so it was just cool to see that as a thing. And obviously the microgreens people, they go through a lot of seeds. So obviously as seed growers you relate like, O.K., these are potential big customer base of people who want microgreens. And so we happened to be doing a bunch of amaranth breeding and realized, yeah, there was sort of a niche, so we started selecting for really bright yellow stems just to add another color spectrum into the microgreen world. So that is one of the things we’ve been doing with amaranth.

Margaret: Well, always good stuff from Peace Seedlings. Thank you guys for making time, Dylana and Mario, today to talk about it. And now go fill some more seed packets, and I hope I’ll talk to you soon again.

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 16th year in March 2025. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Feb. 9, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).