Sow snap pea seeds in your organic garden to produce edible pods with peas inside. Our modern garden peas were developed from the wild pea, which was cultivated as a pulse (dry seed) crop very early on around the Eastern Mediterranean region. Archaeological evidence suggests they were grown as food crops in Neolithic Turkey, Syria, and Jordan, and in the Nile valley in Egypt as early as 4500 BC. Dried peas remained an important foodstuff in Europe into the Middle Ages, but some time in the late 1600s eating green peas (as we do today) became a culinary fad in France and England.