Very sweet peas

This year we planted a large number of sweet peas along the fence surrounding our potato patch, and over by the fence between us and the neighbour.   Sweet peas should produce multi-coloured flowers, and certainly the picture on the packet informed us this was so.  One of my earliest memories of flowers is that of the colourful sweet peas growing in the garden beside the old shed at my grandparents' house.

Anyway, out of the sweet peas that came up, only one has coloured flowers: the remainder are all white, which makes me think they're actually ordinary peas.  Besides that we've had a lot of ordinary peas growing of their own accord because we used pea straw on the garden in different places.

The other day we cooked up a pot of the peas from the supposed 'sweet peas.'   They were delicious: in fact we were eating some of them raw as we shelled them.   According to various online sources, the peas from the sweet pea plant are poisonous.   Hmm.  We're still alive.

So plainly we planted a lot of ordinary peas that had been mislabbeled.  I think we'd have noticed if the peas we were eating were poisonous; I'm sure they would have had a different texture and taste, one that would have put us off eating them.