How To Grow Sweet Peas

Learning how to grow sweet peas is not really very difficult provided you follow a few simple rules.
I like to grow for the house, but I also grow for exhibition when I feel in the mood. On my very first occasion of exhibiting sweet peas in a local flower show many years ago I had two firsts, three seconds and a couple of also-rans up against gardeners who had been showing for years! You can do it too!
If you simply want to grow sweet peas for cutting for the house, or just as a show in the garden, then it's easy. Ideally you want to sow in pots in late autumn - November is good. I use special rooting packs which you can buy from many of the good seedsmen and give a long depth of root.
If you just want to grow for cutting, you can sow them in the early spring. They can also be sown direct into the soil into which they are to grow. Sweet peas can tolerate a temperature of down to -8 degrees C so will overwinter quite well in most places.
If you are growing for really good flowers for the house, or for showing, you need to sow in late autumn in pots, special containers (as I do) or whatever. November is good, as I said above. Don't sow too early, or the plants will become too soft and lanky.
Grow the plants on in a cold greenhouse or cold frame.
Sweet peas require a good soil, with a slow-release fertiliser incorporated, if possible.
From here onwards I am talking about growing for showing or for really first-class flowers for the house. You can grow them up netting or canes and just let them go, but you won't get as good blooms.
Dig a trench in the autumn and incorporate a slow-release fertiliser and some horse or farmyard manure, or your own home-made compost. (More on this later).
Insert 8' canes 6" apart for the length of the row you wish to grow. On my plot this gives me about 60 plants to the row.
Having inserted the canes, you now need to keep them the same distance apart (6") at the top of the canes. This you do by tying string (better still baler twine - as I do) around the canes at about 5' high. Just tie the twine on to the end cane, take to the next one, judge about 6" apart, twist around the cane and then on to the next. Simple really. When you get to the end of the row, tie off the twine and that's it.
Plant one sweet pea to each cane in early April to May, depending mainly on whether your area suffers from cold winds. Sweet peas do not like cold winds early in the growing season. While they will recover, they can suffer a severe check.
For the first three to four weeks they will appear to be doing nothing very much, but will still need a lot of attention. You are going to grow the plants as cordons - that is single-stemmed plants growing up the cane as you would tomatoes, for example.
You have to cut or snip off the tendrils that the plants normally use to climb and grab hold of whatever is to hand. They can throw out two or three of these in a week and start grabbing the plants on either side of them if you are not careful.
This now means that you have to manually tie the plants to the canes. Now you COULD use fillis or raffia, but you'd be there all day, so you need to buy plant rings, (wire, or even plastic) plant supports that you clip around the plant and the cane.
You will need to do this at least once a week as the plants grow, because once they get away they grow very quickly.
Furthermore, many sweet peas grow side-shoots near the base of the plant and these need snipping off also. (If you're growing them for a garden display, then leave the tendrils and side-shoots on). The ones that grow side-shoots will also grow a lot more side-shoots up the plant as it grows and you STILL have to keep snipping these out!
You also need to pinch out the flower stalks. Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous, but we are aiming for top quality flowers, are we not? So you pinch out the flower stalks until the plants have reached about four to four and a half feet up the cane.
Then, and only then, can you let them go. Now they will reward all your efforts with a stunning display of blooms - four or even five to a stem is not unusual, although some varieties will only produce three to a stem.
Now, CUT them! You MUST keep cutting them as you would, for example, runner beans, otherwise they will go to seed and stop flowering. This is the beauty of these little darlings - once they come into flower they just go on and on. My 60 or so plants provide me with cut flowers for the house for weeks on end. Absolutely special!
Now for the last bit.
Drop 'em!
Do WHAT?!
Drop 'em!
Somewhere in July you will find that your plants have reached the top of their canes and are STILL growing! So now what?
This takes about a couple of hours or so for 60 plants but is well worth it.
You take off ALL the plant rings that you have so carefully put on and gently lower the plants to the ground, laying them out behind you. Now you pick up each plant and take it to a cane about four feet to the left or right (it doesn't matter, as long as you do them all in the same direction) and clip it to this new cane.
So now you have about 4' of plant growing up the new cane although the plant is actually about 8' long! And it will continue to grow up its' new support until it reaches the top of that, still producing flowers by which time it will be autumn and the frost will have started to bite.
One little problem is that when you reach the end of your row of canes you will obviously have some plants left over, so what you have to do is insert another few canes into the ground at the end of the row (or coming back parallel to the row if you've reached the side of your plot - which I have - so really it's as if you are starting another row - in order to accommodate the last few plants.
Not too complicated all told, but you will have a MAGNIFICENT display of sweet peas in your house for weeks! Very well worth the time and effort, I promise you.
(Oh, and by the way, the scent of many varieties of sweet peas is out of this world!!!).
Now you can see how to grow superb sweet peas and how easy it is, you'll want to do so every season.

About the Author
Jack West is a garden writer who has been growing for over forty years. His main interests are growing food and flowers for the house. Very recently he has discovered an amazing new way of making garden compost which is far, far better for plants than traditional methods! This is truly groundbreaking (sorry) stuff! Get the red-hot info here:-
http://kmeister.turnwill2.hop.clickbank.net/

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