Overwintering Peas in PA Zone 5

I've been thinking about ways to grow peas where I can get a longer season or fit more plantings in one year. My field is in Zone 5 in PA and general gets frosts mid October and freezes solid in November. In a typical winter, there is snow cover almost the whole winter. There's been some weird weather lately.

So for overwintering peas, is it even possible? I'm probably going to give it a go anyway but I'm curious if anyone has tried it in a northern zone like mine. The only things I could find online were from the UK, which is not super helpful for my climate. I only grow shell and dry peas although I'm going to bring in some colored snow peas for breeding projects next year.

I'm probably going to try both bush and pole peas, a bunch of different varieties. And probably a range of planting dates.

My peas freeze and die during the winter.

I have tried starting peas in pots and transplanting them to get a longer season, but the soil medium is fragile and the soil falls off of the roots. I might try again next year with  a far heavier soil medium

Well, as it turns out, I threw the seeds in the ground to see what happened.

I have live plants! I planted all of the peas on October 15. I planted Tall Telephone (pole) and Maestro (bush). We had an early hard cold in October and when I checked on them October 30th, they were just germinating but I expected them all to die.

We had a cold of 6 degrees with snow cover over thanksgiving

I checked them December 31st and Maestro is alive! The Tall Telephone are completely gone but here's a picture of Maestro. We'll see if they survive current weather, which is teens with windchill down to 0 or negative without snow cover.

Natasha,

I congratulate you on this experiment!  I may give this a shot myself, not so much for the peas, but for the nitrogen fixing ability.

Well done,

Eric